THEME 4 - Afterreflection

The theme of the week was, as you know, quantitative methods. After posting my blog I begun to skim through some of the other students’ blog posts and I realized that I had misunderstood the assignment in some ways. I answered the two last questions in the assignment in relation to the paper that everyone was supposed to read by Olle Bälter. I have now realised that it was not the way it was supposed to be done, but I hope that my answers were relevant anyway.

This week I attended both the seminar and the lecture. The seminar was interesting even though I am unsatisfied with my performance. I had problems remembering what the papers I had read were about even though I tried to skim through them to fresh up my memory. I guess I have to blame the weekends appearance in between my readings and seminar. In the seminar we were supposed to present the paper that we had read this week to each other in small groups. In my group we were only three people and everyone had read the same paper so there was not that much to discuss and compare different methods, which was a shame. Then we were supposed to draw a figure of the method that was used in the paper and that was supposed to illustrate what had been done in the study. I had a bit problem to understand this task, also the other in my group had, even though we got to see figures that other students had made. That, in combination with my bad memory and time pressure in the seminar, made our presentation of what we had done terrible. None of us felt comfortable speaking English and I learnt that I have to prepare a bit extra before next seminar to avoid a similar situation. That could be done by refreshing my memory by skimming through my blog post and the texts that I have read before attending the seminar.

Olle Bälter held the lecture of the week and it was really enjoyable. It not often I laugh that much in the lectures and am a part of such interesting discussion. I loved the structure of the lecture and by making it to a competition the discussions got extra interesting and everyone was active. We mostly discussed advantages and disadvantages with different types of methods, such as paper questionnaire versus online questionnaire or qualitative methods versus quantitative. Also he gave use concrete examples on what is important to think of when formulating questionaries’ for surveys. For instance always have an odd number of answer choices, avoid negotiations in questions and always test it before sending it out, especially if it is computer based.

I have learnt a lot from this theme. It feels like I have achieved more knowledge in the different types of methods that exists and how they can applied and in particular the quantitative methods. Also I have learnt more about the differences, advantages and disadvantages regarding qualitative versus quantitative methods. Furthermore I now know what to consider when designing questionnaires. This knowledge will be useful in my future studies, especially in the upcoming master thesis, because it is important to use the most appropriate method to achieve best results.