Reflection of week 45

Reflection of week 45

This week I had a lecture about quantitative research method as well as the mixed research method, then software SPSS was introduced and practiced in lab.

Quantitative research is based on the fragment of reality. When concentrating on specific problem in life, people need to trail the causalities hidden behind phenomena and finally dig out the reason to it, which can be considered as the guide to other problems. First of all, only narrow range of questions that represent specific aspects in reality can be reached by quantitative method. In this question, people could abstract labels, which stands for one of the conceptualization characteristic in quantitative research method. Then, people need to explore one or more variables logically related to this label to explain. Differing from other research method, statistics based on number and formula should work as the measurement to deal with variables. After collecting the data, people need to check whether they can be used. The data should be of high validity and reliability. Or the hypnosis cannot be proved right and the choices on variables need to be adjusted.

Later, we spent a while to discuss about the benefits and problems about mixed method. It is the combination of data dealing and question explanation. As mixed method imports number and fact supports on research question, the result can be more reliable. However, the question choosing way is harder, because it should be suitably analyzed through quantitative and qualitative research method.

In the process of data dealing and analyzing in quantitative method, software named SPSS (Statistical Package for the Social Sciences) is designed. When doing quantitative research, subjects should answer the questionnaire which contains a great number of single and multiple choices. Then, the variable names as well as corresponding results are typed in the box in SPSS. Generally, people prefer to number the choices and replace result by number, because quantitative is the method basing on number and SPSS is good at number analysis. Most topic researched by quantitative method are multiple variable, whose percentage can be calculated by the software automatically and show is the auto-generated table.

                            

Researchers always copy the table to excel to form the pie chart with direct visual perception.

                           

We also tried the function crosstabs in SPSS to show the relationship between two or more different labels.