research design : E1n1verse

Credit: Photo by Marsha Brockman (whodeenee) under an Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic license

Image: Marbles, many marbles. I think I have lost mine in a sample of many marbles.

I’ve been re-running analyses today on my population of survey responses. I decided to remove some more responses to eliminate some the scatteredness in the population. The majority of responses were from European PvE (player versus the environment) realm players, so I removed the four American realm players and then the five non-PvE players, leaving me with a sample of 30.

The more I read about sampling, the more confused I am.

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Doing Qualitative Research: The Book

Chapter 2 of David Silverman’s Doing Qualitative Research: A Practical Handbook (2010, p.16) asks students to consider why they believe a qualitative approach is appropriate for their possible research topics. In fact, I had not initially considered a qualitative approach at all. With my background in artificial intelligence, software engineering, and information retrieval, I was tending towards quantitative methodologies. Information retrieval is very much about calculations and measurement, so that was a natural fit. Wikipedia (2010) describes the qualitative method as one that “investigates the why and how of decision making, not just what, where, when.”

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