Quantitative Chapter 8

I know, I know, quantitative is boring and everyone hates it. However, I still found this chapter interesting for several reasons.

1. Many of the concepts and questions that the chapter raises when it comes to quantitative research could apply to qualitative as well. While the qualitative chapter goes on to raise similar questions/concerns/emphases, if you take the points this chapter raises about surveys and experiments and apply them to things like interviews and observations, they get you to think about the qualitative research in a way you might not have before.

2. The word “experiment” has immediate connotations in my mind, and so while reading this chapter I imagined popular psychological experiments that are popular in class discussions. I started thinking about the moving parts of experiments like Little Albert, the Stanford Prison Experiments, etc. While a lot of these experiments were deeply flawed, and, technically, used either mixed methods or qualitative approaches, it was still fun to identify the possible instrumentation, populations, sampling, and other factors within the experiments.

Speaking of sampling, I think that's one area where the subjectivity of quantitative experiments becomes immediate. For example, with a survey, you are automatically drawn to a population sample that is willing to take a survey at all. What segment of the population is willing to stay on the phone when a robotic voice tells them it's a survey? What segment of the population clicks on links asking them to answer questions? Of course, pollsters and other people who conduct these surveys would probably argue that as long as the sample is big enough it will be representative of the population at large, and maybe there is evidence for that, but I can't help but feel that a voluntary survey is by design a process that will gravitate toward some populations and away from others. As an example, on 8.1 they show a survey that was given to about 10% of the student population at a small liberal arts college. They wanted to study retention rates, and they used a questionnaire of 116 questions to figure out why so many freshmen and sophomores were dropping out. My immediate concern would be that anyone who was considering dropping out would not fill out a 116 question survey without some serious incentives. The example goes on to mention that the average ACT score of the sample was higher than the population, but it does not appear to address the implications of this, although this is just an excerpt from the paper so maybe it does elsewhere.

Of course, this is me thinking out loud. I'm sure this argument has been discussed and beaten into submission by much smarter people than me.