Theme 4: Quantitative research (Before)

      

      I   chose is called "Facebook use and depressive symptomatology" in which the impact of using Facebook on the mental health of young people (especially systems depression) led to concerns that currently exists for the increase is studied the use of social networks within the youth population. The desired goal is to study whether the association between the use of Facebook and depressive symptoms in young people, is due to individual factors or not. 

This study was performed using quantitative methods. As a quantitative method, online questionnaires were used to obtain the data required for the study. The questionnaire was administered to 237 young adults aged between 18 and 23, these data were further analyzed using statistical method and, hierarchical regression models. Using such methods allows you to collect large volumes of data in a relatively short time. This method allows you to not only save time, but also economical and also facilitates the study subjects to participate more comfortably and efficiently. In turn this has certain limitations such as the study of various factors that may affect the outcome, factors such as social and cultural as well as perform such youth survey is not always to obtain accurate data, since it is not known under the condition in which the subject of study is answering the questionnaire.

 
After reading the paper, I realized how using quantitative methods, you can achieve a bit complex and objectively discard or validate a hypothesis to become a theory. The use of quantitative methods can achieve concrete results.

1.   Which are the benefits and limitations of using quantitative methods?

   Using quantitative methods allow you to collect lots of data in a short time these data can be easily analyzed using statistics. This method requires that the hypothesis be concrete and well made in order to get a general conclusion of a particular topic on the basis of statistical data and analysis. This method has some limitations, the number of people taking part in the study should be representative to achieve conclusive results, if a research is made with few people, then is really hard to generate reliable results, in addition, a problem with many causal elements cannot be solved focusing the study in all of them. Another limitation is the fact that information can be collected from anonymous sources so the accuracy and objectivity of the data is not always the right one.

2.     Which are the benefits and limitations of using qualitative methods?

 Using qualitative methods, a research must be done deeper than using quantitative methods end it is really helpfully to solve complex topics where certain factors intervene like social, politics and cultural factors. This kind of research can allow you to research under different perspective analyzing the behavior of a certain individual in a specific situation. These methods also has some limitations, the time of research must be long and the conclusions sometimes cannot be generalized because of the different factor that lead to certain behavior of the subject.