At the beginning, it’s hard for me to know what kind of research is quantitative research, after searching on the internet, I know quantitative research is the systematic empirical investigation of observable phenomena via statistical, mathematical or computational techniques. And I know questionnaire, and experimental test, statistic, analysis and conclude are used in a quantitative research.
My chosen paper is "Activity Recognition using Cell Phone Accelerometers"
Authors: Jennifer R. Kwapisz Fordham University, Bronx, NY
Gary M. Weiss Fordham University, Bronx, NY
Samuel A. Moore Fordham University, Bronx, NY
Published Newsletter: ACM SIGKDD Explorations Newsletter archive
Volume 12 Issue 2, December 2010
This paper talked about to describe and evaluate a system that uses phone-based accelerometers to perform activity recognition, a task which involves identifying the physical activity a user is performing.
Which quantitative method or methods are used in the paper? Which are the benefits and limitations of using these methods?
The method is collection of empirical data, the benefits are understood and respond more appropriately to dynamics of situations, provide respect to contextual differences, help to build upon what is already known, provide opportunity to meet standards of professional research.
What did you learn about quantitative methods from reading the paper?
Quantitative research includes, hypotheses, predictions, observation, experiment, test of predictions, conclude etc. The experiment is an important part in quantitative research.
Which are the main methodological problems of the study? How could the use of the quantitative method or methods have been improved?
They hypotheses, and use quantitative methods to verify which of such hypotheses are true. They collected labeled accelerometer data from twenty-nine users as they performed daily activities such as walking, jogging, climbing stairs, sitting, and standing, and then aggregated this time series data into examples that summarise the user activity over 10 second intervals. And they plot the figures and analysis the data collected. Finally, they conclude the result.
IEEE VR 2012 - Drumming in Immersive Virtual Reality
Which are the benefits and limitations of using quantitative methods?
Benefits
- Testing and validating already constructed theories about how and why phenomena occur
- Testing hypotheses that are constructed before the data are collected
- Can generalize research findings when the data are based on random samples of sufficient size
- Can generalize a research finding when it has been replicated on many different populations and subpopulations
- Useful for obtaining data that allow quantitative predictions to be made
- The researcher may construct a situation that eliminates the confounding influence of many variables, allowing one to more credibly establish cause-and-effect relationships
- Data collection using some quantitative methods is relatively quick (e.g., telephone interviews)
- Provides precise, quantitative, numerical data
- Data analysis is relatively less time consuming (using statistical software)
The research results are relatively independent of the researcher (e.g., statistical significance)
It may have higher credibility with many people in power (e.g., administrators, politicians, people who fund programs)
It is useful for studying large numbers of people
Limitations
- The researcher’s categories that are used might not reflect local constituencies’ understandings
- The researcher’s theories that are used might not reflect local constituencies’ understandings
- The researcher might miss out on phenomena occurring because of the focus on theory or hypothesis testing rather than on theory or hypothesis generation (called the confirmation bias)
Knowledge produced might be too abstract and general for direct application to specific local situations, contexts, and individuals.
Which are the benefits and limitations of using qualitative methods?
Benefits
- provide you with details about the human behaviour, emotion, and personality characteristics that quantitative studies cannot match.
- Qualitative data includes information about user behaviours, needs, desires, routines, use cases, and a variety of other information that is essential in designing a product that will actually fit into a user’s life.
Limitation
- qualitative research requires the flexibility of data collection, allowing you to respond to user data as it emerges during a session.
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