Assignment 3: Quantitative methods

The article “Mixed research and online learning: Strategies for improvement” is a methodological paper. The main purpose of the study is explanation of the benefits of the mixed research over pure quantitative or qualitative papers. Authors believe that the application of mixed approach will help to improve the quality of papers on online learning, this assumption supported by logical and relevant arguments. 

We cannot disagree with the fact that the complexity of using a mixed approach is often underestimated. I’m trying to use the mixed research in my paper, so the problems occurred in mixed research are relatively well-known for me. As rightly pointed by Lowenthal and Leech, it’s difficult to formulate research question appealing to both quantitative and qualitative methods and even more difficult to identify the research design. 

I think, in my case the question “How efficient is technology of branded content?” can be answered both from of the position of qualitative approach by performing focused interviews or quantitative approach by conduction of mass survey. The former explains the perception of brand image by audience and the latter provides data on brand awareness. It is a big challenge to bridge the findings from those two parts and make them mutually complementary. 

So the paragraphs explaining steps and data analysis techniques for a mixed research were very useful for me. I would say that main disadvantage of provided guidelines is a lack of practical examples of successful mixed studies and their designs.  

The second article “Emotional presence, learning and the online learning environment” is an example of good quantitative study. The hypothesis of the paper is that emotional presence exists in online learning communities. Main concepts are emotional presence, the community of inquiry, social, cognitive and teaching presence. This is an applied research, the empirical data is collected from survey of questions answered by students (N=217) and from transcriptions of online conferences during the course. Objectivity in the interpretation of scripted data is achieved through the phased coding performed by the group of coders and the methodic of factor analysis. 

Main conclusion drawn by the researches is “that emotion is present in online learning communities” and “that in online experience […] emotional presence exists in social, cognitive and teaching presence”. These statements don’t go that far because the object of the research wasn’t well-investigated before the study of Cleveland-Innes & Campbell. Therefore this research is rather limited as an exploratory study conducted in the specific context. However, this does not diminish the importance of the study: on the first stage it is necessary to identify the emotional presence in the online environment.

However, the disadvantage of this study is that the researchers are using only quantitative approach. As many proponents of this approach Cleveland-Innes & Campbell see the possibility of deepening their study in expansion of the number of samples: “study must now be replicated with […] larger samples to validate our exploratory statistical analysis”. Of course, the sample size affects the accuracy of the data, but the capabilities of a quantitative method are initially limited.