Friday, 29 January 2016

Research Diary 1

Technology develops very fast nowadays and currently we are influenced by media in our everyday life that people in different background are clustered in different ways, cultures are formed differently, becomes more virtualized. Many unknown incidents are happening or will be happened that academic researches are needed to perform to help people to understand what have been happening through human behaviour in the digital era, asking questions and developing answers through serious critical thinking and thoughtful reflection. Researchers can share their ideas and findings. Thurs, the professionals can take those as results to make certain respond or solve problem. It could bring the media into next level or solve the crime brought by the internet. Quantitative research and qualitative research are the common methods of research. Both research methods contain data collection and analysis, but the aim and type of data are totally different. Quantitative research is based on theory to prove the hypothesis by the collected data which reduced to number and analysed by statistic. Generally, it is to look into the relationship of variables. Measurement of reliability and validity and causality are important. It is good for a large number of subjects, the design of research can eliminate the influence of many variables to be more accurate and research results are relatively independent of the researcher. However, there is the assumption of variables that measurement process possesses an artificial sense of precision and accuracy. Qualitative research is gather all data which usually are words of description of feeling or phenomenon, then categorize, organize and formulate a theory. It is to explore experience, culture or particular issue. It is good to provide in-depth case information and describe complex phenomena. However, massive time of collecting and analyzing data is crucial and the results are more easily influenced by the researcher's personal biases. Imagined communities are newly formed in the century and fascinated me a lot. I am going to study how the cyber space, virtual culture and imagined identity formed under global and local cultural context. In my research, mixed research will be performed to get a more accurate statistic result with credibility and validity, but also obtain in-depth discussion of emotion and experience. A timeline of history, the origin culture, textual analysis, survey and interview will be conducted. Name: Chan Nga Yin

1 comment:

  1. Dear Nga Yin, Discussion of the differences of quantitative and qualitative research is fine. Key criteria of the methods are mentioned. It is ambitious to apply both methods in your research on virtual communities. Now you can start making your research topic more specific and then pick a primary research method. For example, you can make use of qualitative research but it can then be supplemented by statistical data from other sources. It would be difficult to do everything by yourself in your project.

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