Theme 5 After reflection: Design research

Before the lecture this week I read the two papers of Salnäs et al and reflected on the following questions:

1.     How does a collaborative setting differ from a single user setting as regards methodology used and the results obtained?
A collaborative setting is when the participants are two or more during a testing. It opens up for the participants to talk about their thoughts in a more natural way than forcing them to ask question to each other for example. It becomes more of a think-aloud sort of testing. A single user setting is when there is only one participant at the time.

I think you might get more results out of a collaborative setting due to the fact that the participant can talk to each other, ask questions and therefore get a deeper understanding and insight in the subject. But at the same time they might influence each other to think very similar witch could be negative for the result.
The result from a single user setting is only based on one person and the researchers are therefore missing out on “the whole picture”, i.e. group discussions and dynamics.

2.     How can qualitative and quantitative methods in the same study complement each other?
When using a quantitative method you get a very broad understanding of the subject based on the data and numbers. When combining that with a qualitative method you will be able to use the strengths from both methods. You first get the raw data from the quantitative method but you also get a deeper understanding of the subject thanks to the “soft” data that the qualitative method brings. By acknowledging the weaknesses in the quantitative data, you can compensate that in the qualitative method and vice versa. 

3.     How can using both subjective and objective methods give a better understanding of a phenomenon?
For me the answer is pretty similar to the one above. By using a subjective method (qualitative) with an objective method we get an overview and therefore a better understanding in the subject. So the both methods complement each other and that is important for fully understanding a phenomena.

When choosing a question to discuss during the lecture with Salnäs I choose the third because I’m not sure what the differences between quantitative/subjective and qualitative/objective methods are. But at the seminar I realized that we where supposed to have come-up a new question, which I totally missed. But by the number of questions we discussed in the seminar (one) I think a lot of people missed that.

Salnäs began to talk about that you could gain a lot by using both a qualitative and a quantitative method. That I knew from before but she also pointed out that if you investigating something in a “white spot” (a area that you don’t know much about), you should use a qualitative method a bit more. But you can also conduct qualitative data from a quantitative method. For example you can videotape the respondent when answering a survey and after transcribe and analysis the respondent conversation and questions and therefore get a deeper understanding (sort of observation technique/method). I think that is quite clever to videotape the response so you later can analyze the immediate response instead of doing an interview and therefore depending on the respondents’ interpretation of the situation. But of course a interview can lead to a deeper understanding than the videotape.

Honestly I didn’t enjoy the seminar that much because I barley learned anything new. Salnäs talked a lot of her research in haptic, and for me that is not very interesting. What I did enjoy was to hear how she thinks when doing a research and the problems you stumble upon doing one (i.e. specific surveys didn’t exist in some area). But for people interesting in haptic of course this seminar was very interesting.