Well, I can effectively say that if I weren't scared of quantitative research before, I certainly am now. Thanks chapter 8, you're what nightmares are made of. on a serious note though, many of my other colleagues seem to be on the same page as me; and though I am much more drawn to qualitative research, the Creswell text was an enormous help to getting a better glimpse at the topic. What I found especially helpful were all of the charts/tables throughout the text (147, 151, 153, 156, 163-165). With serious instruction, I could probably handle one of these research projects through a quantitative method with the help of the checklists provided in the chapter, because those steps are fairly black and white, but pre-experiemental design really threw me off. The different types of experimental design had me scratching my head, I honestly felt like I was in a math class. The concept of threats made sense; that's similar to evaluating biases in qualitative research, I'm pretty confident of that lesson. Hopefully class tomorrow will help me get a stronger hold on this method.
As for qualitative, I'm much more comfortable diving into this approach. I'd almost go so far as to say that with face-to-face interactions, better data can be collected. Watching mannerisms and even recording things like gasps/pauses in speech can be very valuable to what a person is attempting to communicate, the only problem is that, language is not universal, and what may be discomfort in someone's voice to me, might not always be the same thing to the person speaking. Data analyses could also be tricky, as well as discussing the expected outcome of the study. My favorite part of this method is the freedom to use something like personal narrative to portray the point. It only makes sense that, when dealing with the personal, you'd be able to include yourself...but the tricky part there is knowing when to draw the line on what is too personal or private for publication, is there is such a thing.
I'm looking forward to exploring these approaches in class tomorrow, and hopefully gaining more insight on quantitative research methods.
Bree--
ReplyDeleteThe nice thing about being at a graduate level is that you shouldn't have to do any quantitative research if you don't want to!
As to your point about face-to-face interactions being more valuable, I definitely think it depends on the situation. I think there is some research that just needs the bigger net that quantitative is able to cast, despite the negative glow Pimentel and, to a lesser extent, this book gave it!
Your last few sentences are interesting because of the connection to Jackson's class, given how far away the writing/"research" we are looking at in there is from the research we look at for Creswell's text.