Pre-seminar 4

The paper I chose is called Undermining the Corrective Effects of Media-Based Political Fact Checking? The Role of Contextual Cues and Naïve Theory and examines how people react to a certain misperception when they are corrected, that is if they still believe it to be true, treat it with skepticism or believe it to be true.

1. Which quantitative method or methods are used in the paper? Which are the benefits and limitations of using these methods?

This paper based its measurements largely on a questionnaire with likert scale answers, but with different numbers of scale steps for the participant to chose from for different answers.

There are some limitations to using likert scale for measuring, mainly that a likert scale implies that there is an equal distance between the steps, while that may not always be the case when using them, for example when using them with a statement that can be answered with “strongly disagree” up to “strongly agree”. There has been critique whether it is possible

Some say that since the incremental steps are not always equal, it would be a better measurement to show the median value instead of the mean value when analysing answers from likert scales. However I feel the scales in this paper have steps with equal distance between them and that the use of mean is therefore a good measurement, though I would’ve liked to see the median as well.

2. What did you learn about quantitative methods from reading the paper?

The quantitative methods used in this paper were largely used to easily chart trends based on certain base conditions for each group in the experiment. For this kind of usage, quantitative data is very handy, but there are also some limitations. Quantitative data in the form of questionnaires tend to border on qualitative data, except that they themselves define the questions and leave little room for the participant to reflect freely on what they themselves felt was relevant during the study.

3. Which are the main methodological problems of the study? How could the use of the quantitative method or methods have been improved?

The character of the study in the paper makes it harder to improve much upon quantitative methods in it. Since the paper investigates peoples reactions, it is hard to treat the information more quantitatively than it already is, according to me. That would change the nature of the study too much.

The paper Drumming in Immersive Virtual Reality tries to answer whether when we perceive a new virtual body, different from our own, it will affect our behavior and attitudes. The study tested the performance of groups of participants when drumming in a virtual reality world with regard to a new perceived body of diffrent connotations. One body was light-skinned and with a formal attire and the other was dark-skinned and more casually dressed. The data was gathered through a questionnaire as well as through registered movement data from the participants of the two groups.

Quantitative data is tells us something that we have observed in a more objective way than qualitative data might. However, as we’ve found out earlier in the course, observing quantitative data is not entirely objective, but depends on the perceiver. In the paper the quantitative data largely is the movement data collected from the participants and the answers from the questionnaire. The movement data from participants is quantitative and can therefore conform to charts and maths, which give us an easy way to chart trends for example. We can see if this data is converging towards a certain value or if there’s no correlation between data sets for example. With the movement data we can measure the performativity of the participants of the different groups and draw a conclusion whether they are similar or differ from each other.

The answers from the questionnaire deal in part with what the participants experienced during the experiment, but are defined in a very quantifiable way in the form of Likert scales. When the participants answer the statements on a graded scale we can quantify it in some way (though there is some controversy surrounding this with Likert scales as stated above) and use it to chart trends. However, how can we know that different persons grade the scale equally. A 5 on a scale of 10 does not have to have equal value to what another person considers a 5 to be on that scale.

Qualitative methods in contrast to quantitative methods give a much more nuanced view on what’s being researched. Here there is room for new perspectives that might lead to new insight in the subject. Of course it is not as easily quantifiable and therefore hard to say what it means and if the data has been interpreted correctly by the researcher.