Today’s Plan:
- Extra Credit Reminder
- How to Read Quantitative Research
- Homework
How to Read Quantitative Research
I got an email question regarding tips on deciphering quantitative research. It is hard! I will admit that I am not an expert on this. I also recognize that I haven’t spent much time on the types of research this semester. Let’s do that today.
Generally, we refer to academic work using two terms: scholarship and research (note that some folks don’t like this distinction, but it works for me). Research tends to come in two flavors, qualitative and quantitative:
- Hermeneutic: words as a result of reading and interpreting texts
- Qualitative: words, numbers as a process of measurement
- Quantitative: numbers as direct result of measurement
Both hermeneutic scholarship and qualitative research use words. One thing that distinguishes them is how they collect the texts they analyze. Think of our Sicart project. I didn’t use a method to select Sicart. Or Wolf Among Them. I picked them because my expertise as a scholar helped me identify them as engaging texts that could tell us something about the human condition. Compare this to the representations project–those were qualitative projects–and my emphasis was on helping you articulate a replicable process for selecting games, and detailing as clearly as possible the interpretive system you used to analyze those games. The lines between hermeneutic and qualitative scholarship can get blurry sometimes–but an emphasis on methodology (and whether you organize your paper like a quantitative one) tells us a lot about how you hope to position your work along the scholarship/research lines.
Quantitative work has even more precise methodological expectations than quantitative. There’s some (arcane) vocabularies built around answering and systematizing some pretty simple questions:
- How did they collect their numbers?
- If they collect their material from people, how did they find those people? Was the sampling “random”? How did they choose which subjects to include? How many people did they “sample”? How well does the sample reflect the general population?
- What did they do to the data they collected? Did they synthesize or code it? Did they do frequency analysis?
I’m going to be honest here–I cannot always interpret quantitative analyses. I don’t really know how to calculate a p-value. But I do know to look for a discussion of a p-value and I also know that some researchers are trying to move away from p-values. It can help to have a good glossary of terms.
