"Learning is not only to understand what the lecturers said on the lesson, learning is to explore the knowledges from the lesson." ---- an unforgettable said form my former teacher when I was a higher diploma student. It is a motto that keep inspiring me to study in the way of searching the extra information and knowledges through the search engine, printed book or asking teachers.
In search of making an efficient learning result and gaining a fruitful experience, academic research is an advance work for student to explore the knowledge by ourselves, not only by asking teacher.
As a student in the field of media culture, it is easy to discover the division point or difference of opinion from the public in a media study. Thanks to the development of technology, the information can be delivered as fast as a bullet in these day. It is unimaginable that people can receive the message within a second that the message send out. Meanwhile, people are not adapt to verify the true or bogus of the message before they forward the message out to the other. Thus, doing academic research on media and culture can carry out a result that to identify if the message true or bogus. The most achievable thing is it can make a strong justification to convince the others.
There are two types of research methods: Qualitative research and Quantitative research, both of them play an important role on conducting an academic research. However, both of them have each strengths and weaknesses.
For the qualitative research, it is about to gain an understanding of underlying reasons and motivations of some phenomenon. In other words, it is to find out what and why the people would make those reaction of the topic. In order to gain the information to analyse, face-to-face interview is a need. The data are based on the interviewees’ own feeling and opinions. It is provides the individuals case informations that we can analyse the data in-depth. However, qualitative research is time consuming that to collect the useful data and the result is not objective as it is easily influenced by a little group of people.
For the quantitative research, it is about asking people for the opinions through collecting data, for instance, doing surveys or questionnaires, so that I can make a statistics and facts to help me to finish my academic research. It is useful for studying a large numbers of people and time saving. However, quantitative research fails to distinguish people from the world of nature.
I would like to study about the hybridisation of horror film. I can measure various views and opinions in a chosen sample in terms of how the people feel after watching the horror films of different country through collecting surveys. But if I want to enrich my research, using the theory to help analysing is not enough. In order to gain an in-depth result, quantitative research, interview the film critics is a need.
Lo Hing Lun, Austin
Dear Austin, The writing addresses the questions suggested in the assignment brief. The linkage between sections is nice. Strengths and weaknesses of quantitative and qualitative research methods are illustrated clearly. The research question is interesting and the selected methods are appropriate. You can take a look of genre theory in order to examine the evolution of horror films.
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