Research Diary I

Media and culture is a great topic in the cultural studies. One of the result that this topic wants to measure how the mass media influence the public. And also will the message from these mass media bring the same impact to the public. And academic research is a useful way to measure the result. Academic research can help the researcher of cultural studies that to measure the impact of the mass media towards the public. There are many ways to do the academic research. And the Qualitative and the Quantitative research are the common research method.

Let me define the Qualitative research first. The aim of this method is measuring the meanings behind of the people’s thinking and behavior. This method can provide the rich and detailed result.  The strengths of this method are it can explore the topic in more depth and detail.  The researcher has more freedom to explore more angles of the topic from the research questions. And the weakness of this method is more time consuming because of the deeply analysis the interviewer. Also the result came out by this method is hard to approach statistically because of the answer of audiences may have great differences. And the audience’s personal interaction may difficult to the researcher to measure.

Quantitative research can collect the data from large group of people. And mainly to measure the question of “How many” and “How often”. The strengths of this method are the result are easy to collect and analyze quickly and fairly. Also, the result will more reliable and easy to generalized to the entire population if the response rate is high enough. The weakness of this method are may be very costly because the researcher need to interview a large group of people. Also the result this method has are less detail and depth than qualitative research.

And I have an idea of choosing the topic of media and violence because I enjoy and know more about the violence game. I will use the qualitative research to analyze this topic because of I can collect the detailed and rich result about how the audience feel and thinking about these kind of violence game. Also this method can let me have opportunity to observe and interview the game players. It is easy to measure how the acceptable of the player towards these violence games and sum up the level of violence. So I can analyze this topic accurately.