Theme 4: Qualitative methods

The name of the Journal is “Journal of science and medicine in sport” and has an impact factor of 3,034. The name of the chosen study is: “Voices in the playground: A qualitative exploration of the barriers and facilitators of lunchtime play”. Basically the intention of the descriptive study was to explore children´s perceptions of the factors influencing their commitment in physical activities during the lunchtime phase. 

1.      Semi-structured focus groups were performed with participating children with an average age of eleven years old. They study was conducted in Australia, with a wide range of different attending schools including rural-, non-governmental- or co-educational. Semi-structured focus groups are good because it gives all the participants similar and fairly asked questions which in turn give wider answer opportunities. In addition, separate male and female focus groups were used which was necessary in order to discuss gender-specific factors such as body image. Especially appropriate when children are involved with possible tendencies of peer pressure. Audio-taping and immediate analysis after was also conducted. One possible limitation of semi-structured focus groups could be that it´s relatively easy to affect or direct the participants by means of follow-up questions.

2.      One thing I particularly learned was that it might be easier to involve children in focus groups than what I first thought from the beginning. As long you are clear and make the children notably comfortable with the people around them I believe it´s not that difficult. The results enlightened me about this which in turn were well-structured with factors, sub-factors and quotes. The distinctness was excellent which usually may be a common possible limitation of a qualitative study.

3.      The number of participants was rather uneven in the focus groups and children might not have expressed themselves truthfully in terms of more personalized questions involving bullying and teasing in front of other classmates. The highest number of participants in a group was nine and I assumed that’s quite huge regarding mentioned aspects. An improvement would be to minimize those and furthermore increase the amount of smaller groups. Anyway I thought this study was comparatively reliable because I was relatively acquainted with both the different factors and the answer from the students. In other words I have experienced sense-data from these kinds of issues.

This paper was found via the web of science but of course we can argue about how relevant the study really is for media technology. I believe it is significant though in terms of somehow guide us how we can promote physical activities within media research. Except for Wii and similar additions I don´t see that many technologies which one way or another make us move more.  

Comics, Robots, Fashion and Programming: outlining the concept of actDresses

Basically this paper is about how physical decorations can be used for programming and controlling the manner of robotic systems.

They mention several times within the study that one of the purposes is to make programming more concrete by for instance putting clothes on a dinosaur toy, attaching magnetic patches on cylinder formed robots or pasting stickers on vacuum cleaning robots. By means of semiotics theory, different signs are supposed to create a new type of physical language for normal people. I don´t see the significant purpose of the first two examples. The clothes/decorations seemed to be used only for making robots more like pets. Meaningful for allergists? The last example though seemed to be more reasonable because of the cleaning purpose. But this may also force us to be more bound with the robot and that´s kind of contradictory to its general purpose of being automatically guided. 

Question: Which qualitative and quantitative methods are the most appropriate to combine within mixed research in terms of reliability?