Research Diary 1

The concept of culture in media study became one of increasingly important and pervasive object in today. It has become increasingly questioned. Every scholar might through the academic research to view the different fields of studies and discuss whether to retain or change or discard the concept of culture. There are two research method are common use on academic study, which are Qualitative Research and Quantitative Research.

Qualitative Research is an exploratory research.  It is used to collect an underlying reasons, common and motivations. Data also reported in the language of the information. It provides insights into the question or creates a helps to develop ideas and hypotheses for research. There are common methods consist of a group discussions and individual interviews when running a qualitative research. Comparing with quantitative Research, it is used to adopt statistical, mathematical or computational techniques methods to analysis the numerical data or that can be transformed into usable statistics. It is used to quantify attitudes, opinions and behaviors. The major different between qualitative research and quantitative Research is the latter rely on measurable data to formulate facts in research. And, quantitative data collection methods are much more structured than qualitative data collection methods. Also, quantitative Research data collection methods are consist various form of surveys such as online surveys, paper surveys, telephone interviews and online polls.

On the other hands, there are strengths and weakness when running a quantitative research or qualitative research. Regarding various form of quantitative research data collection methods, some preoccupations of quantitative research may generation and replication for the random sampling (Cheung, 2016). For instance, the research findings can be sought to replicate and fails to reflect the complex phenomena. However, quantitative research is useful for studying large numbers of people or subjects such as General elections, it consist of large numbers of vote by people. Also, the researcher results are relatively independent of the researcher and relatively less time consuming such as adopting statistical software and telephone interviews. Moreover, qualitative research is focus on in-depth interviews, field research and etc. It is useful for studying a limited number of cases in depth and describing complex phenomena. Data usually collected in naturalistic settings such as a beauty contest, but, running a qualitative research generally takes more time to collect and analysis the data when compared to quantitative research (Cheung, 2016).

For my general research topic, I’m going to study the “Hong Kong internet article 23”, of online communities and questioned how teenagers and students perceive this law, whether they will either agree to adopt or what is their biggest concern about the law. Because internet have become a part of our life, this law might affect the future trend of internet. Thus, I would adopt qualitative research to study my topic. Because, it may help to have a deep dive analysis the thought of our generation and research to seek the underlying reasons and common from them.