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?
I think your question is interesting. I would say that you should combine the most complementary methods for your research, but I am not sure if these are different depending on the field of study. For example, a survey that collects hundreds of answers might be best complemented with deep qualitative individual interview to get more detailed data. But a survey with smaller sample size might be better paired with a focus group discussion to get some more people to gather data from, compared to individual interviews.
SvaraRaderaYou say that you learned that it might be easier than you though to involve children into a focus group. When I wrote my bachelor thesis, me and my co-writer used children in our focus group with an average age of 7 and I was positively surprise because they were so easy to work with. The best part was that they didn’t reflect over what was going on so I think that our result got reliable because the children was very honest and not stressed at all which might be a problem in other focus groups. But we didn’t ask as personal questions as the researcher in your article did so our focus group might have been easier to deal with than theres (I’m referring to the bullying questions).
SvaraRadera