Research Diary 1

Since the emergent and development of media in 20th century, it becomes part of our daily life.  For example, we watch TV at home when we are bored, we surf the net with our smartphones while we are waiting or walking and we use the computer when we are working.  Therefore, media brings a big influence to our society and we cannot live without media.  The media leads a change to the traditional culture in our society.  Because of these changes, an academic research can help us to find out the answers as to solve the questions that in our mind such as the relationship between the society and media and the problems of over rely on media. 

If we need to do an academic research, there are two research methods that we can use: quantitative research method and qualitative research method.

Quantitative research method is to quantify data and generalize results from a sample to the population of interest.  Also, it can measure the incidence of various views and opinions.  It is good for studying large numbers of people and the research results are relatively independent of the researchers.  It should be more objective when we are doing the research.  The researcher’s design can eliminate the influence of many variables.  However, it fails to distinguish and social institutions from the world of nature and the measurement process possess an artificial sense of precision and accuracy.

Apart from quantitative research method, qualitative research method can be used.  Qualitative research method is to gain an understanding of underlying reasons and motivations, provide insights into the setting of a problem, generating ideas and hypotheses for later quantitative research and uncover prevalent trends in thought and opinion.  Although it provides in depth or individual case information, useful for describing complex phenomena and the researcher can study dynamic processes, it generally takes more time to collect and analysis the data and t should be more subjective when we are doing the research, thus the results are more easily influenced by the researcher’s personal biases.

Up to now, in the seven topics that have been provided, I prefer to choose the topic of media and violence.  As violence is a big issue that discussed among the world, it has a big impact to the society.  Moreover, we can noticed that many video games which are widely claimed to be violence, is it one of the reason that people in the society become violence due to the video games.  I have a big interest and curiosity on it.  I hope to explore more on this topic and to find out the answer in my research.

For my research, I suppose to use the qualitative research method because I seek to gather an in-depth understanding of human behavior on violence and the reasons that govern such behavior. I will focus on two or three people that love playing violence video game and have an in-depth interviews with them as to get the primary information.  Through a deep observation on their behavior, I can get more useful information for the research.  Also, newspapers, books and researches will be the secondary information for my study.

Student: Tang Yee Ting, Stephanie