The week consisted of two seminars - one with Stefan Hrastinski and one with Olle Bälter. In the first one, led by Hrastinski, the group of people who showed up were asked to outline the "core elements" of the quantitative research we've been asked to choose, by drawing a diagram of the key points which, hopefully, could show some kind of causality in the research. It was an interesting excercise, and proved to require good knowledge of the research paper.
The second seminar, by Olle Bälter, started off by Bälter teaching us the rules of the game 'Boggle', after which the rest of the seminar was conducted in a Boggle-esque competition with four teams. The groups were to come up with as many unique pros and cons of qualitative and quantitative research - as well as unique aspects of performing questionnaires by web, or in a physical manner. Some interesting discussions sparked and different views were weathered, which - at least for myself - was intensified by the competitive nature. It was claimed that there was an environmental benefit from sending questionnaires by e-mail instead of mail, but I replied that this is not as clear as intuition first might propose. The environmental impact of data traffic is not something the intuition of most of us is capable of dealing with, because its natural complexity and many co-operating 'hidden' elements; my computer, the data center, the electrical companie's emission, etc. Anyway, there was no general consensus about which one was the lesser of two evils, so I think we agreed to take the scientific road and adopt an agnostic view, until we've done more research on the subject.
We also were presented with some bad examples of how quantitative research had been conducted with a survey for the staff members of KTH. "Go great lengths to avoid the word 'not'", and avoid ambiguity in the questions, were two of the hands-on advices we got. All in all, I think this was a good week.
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