Media and culture, which both word “media” and “culture” have their own meaning in dictionary for sure, however they are related to something not stable, do not have an absolute constant that could change and grow from time to time, as the diversity is board for both “media” and “culture”. Media would change in terms of form and medium depends on technology development while culture would change regarding to the changes among people, society and the whole world. Hence, academic researches are required for media and culture related topics, in order to study the history and experience as reference to explain and analyse their changes also some theories and symptoms.
Furthermore about doing research, approaching either quantitative or qualitative research method would make a big difference of outcome due to their own properties. For quantitative research, for example surveys, all collected data are quantified, using mathematical statistic to analysis pattern of relationship and interpret through specific question and choice of answers. Its’ strength is that a large amount of data can be collected and the outcome are independent regardless of the researchers him/herself and researchers can limit the scope of answers to obtain wanted data from the research to make it more useful. However the random sampling sequence, would affect the reliability and reality thus weakening the accuracy of this method.
Oppositely, the strength of qualitative research is that data is collected in naturalistic setting, the content is more humanized, providing information in-depth and capable for complex phenomena, for example through personal in-depth interview, however qualitative research is more time consuming for both collecting and analysing data and results could be easily influenced by researchers’ oneself. Also the accumulated data would be not related to each other at all as questions asked are open-end usually.
For my own proposed research topic, i would like to study on media ownership and media content, as my family do buying and reading different newspapers and magazines till this digital era. Meanwhile young generation do read news online and having a high participation in media. And I would like to adopt the quantitative research method as to reach a larger group of people to obtain larger amount of data. As well as this topic is quite straightforward that whether the ownership have affected the content of selected publication or not , which I think that mathematical statistic supporting yes or no within a few common reasons is more important, and I can customize the questionnaire to only obtain the data I needed.
Student: Mak Ka Tsun, KT
Dear Ka Tsun, The writing provides precise summary of the differences between quantitative and qualitative research methods. I am not sure what you mean by the sentence: "...random sampling sequence, would affect the reliability and reality thus weakening the accuracy of this method." This needs clarification. For the research question, I guess you may be interested in doing content analysis. Now you can start thinking about how to operationalise the terms in the question in order to make things quantifiable.
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