Introduction To Research Methods For A Comprehensive Understanding

Methodology

The main objective of the research

The main aim of this research paper is to help the students get a comprehensive understanding of the methodologies used in research. The success of any research is normally highly dependent on the effectiveness of the methodology applied in the research. By doing this paper, the students will understand how to come up with good methodologies which they can apply when doing different types of research to make them successful.

The research problem and the collected literature

For the last few years, the use of technology has been rising at an alarming rate. Many sectors, including the governmental and the non-governmental sectors, have embraced the use of the advancing technology positively and have ended up benefiting in different ways. Some of the main benefits which have been achieved through the use of the modern technology include improved productions in the industries which have embraced the use of modern technology in the production process, improving the overall efficiencies of the sectors where the technology is used, improved decision-making processes which have been achieved by utilizing intelligent information systems such as the decision support system (DSS) in areas where some critical decisions need to be made, among many other benefits. Although technology is very advantageous, there are some limitations and some problems associated with it. According to our previous assignment, we found that there are some areas which need to be addressed fully for the people to enjoy the many benefits associated with the advancing technology or the digital democracy. Some of the areas which are still facing some problems and more research need to be done to improve digital democracy include the decision-making process which normally driven by small and big data, the open government data, responsible use of data, citizen engagement, and proper incentives. There is much about digital democracy to be investigated and addressed in these key areas for the people to enjoy the many benefits of digital democracy in the areas they employ the modern technology. The investigation and improvement of these key areas remain a major problem in digital democracy which needs to be given good efforts to be addressed fully.

From the previous assignment, we also learn that the use of the internet has also been rising rapidly over the last few years. Many people, especially the youths have been addicted to the internet and the social media platforms. Twitter and Facebook are the main social media platforms which have addicted many youths who spend most of their time chatting with different people across the entire world. Even though the internet is a very good tool for research and the social media platforms are very good platforms for socializing and making new friends, there are some problems associated with the wrong use of the internet and the social media platforms. Among the major problems associated with the wrong usage of the internet and the social media platforms which need to be addressed include causing addiction where some people can’t live without them, promoting de-individuation where the internet users spend most of their time alone, increasing the cases of online harassments, increasing cases of slacktivism, promoting self-segregation, among other problems. These problems are serious problems associated with the internet and the social media and need to be addressed accordingly.

Organization of the collected literature

Research Problem and Collected Literature

Literature collection table

Research problem	Sub Problem	Collected Literature
The digital democracy problem	The decision making driven by small and big data problem	· (Zuckerberg and Sittig 2015) · (Tiago and Verissimo 2014)
The open government data problem	· (Perrin 2015) · (Chen, Paik, and Hung 2015)
The problem of the responsible use of data	· (Noveck 2017)
The problem of citizen engagement	· (Carr and Hayes 2015)
The problem of proper or good incentives	· (Noveck 2017)
The internet and social media problem	Addiction problems	· (Anand et al. 2018)
De-individuation problems	· (Harmon 2014)
Online harassments problems	· (Rao 2016)
Slacktivism problem	· (Bozarth, L. and Budak 2017)
Self-segregation problem	· (Van den Heuvel 2017)

Methodology can be defined as a system or a set of various methods which are employed in the research process to help in getting the desired outcomes or results. There are various types of methodology employed in research depending on the type of research being done. The most common types employed in research are quantitative and quantitative methodologies depending on the type of data to be encountered in the research.

Quantitative methodology

Quantitative methodology is the type of research methodology which deals with the numerical type of data.  This methodology emphasizes on the collection and analysis of numerical data. Some statistical and mathematical analysis methods are employed in the analysis of the data (Heck and Thomas, 2015). Complex mathematics and statistics computational techniques are employed when analyzing the data and some special mathematical and statistical software packages such as SPSS, STATA, Excel, among other software may be employed to help in data analysis.

Qualitative methodology, on the other hand, deals with the collection and analysis of data presented in non-numerical forms. The data collected in qualitative methodology may be in the form of texts, images, sounds, videos, drawings, recordings, among many other non-numerical forms (Taylor, Bogdan, and DeVault, 2015). The analysis of the data collected in qualitative methodology is much easier since it rarely employs some complex analysis software like the ones required in quantitative methodology.

Both quantitative and qualitative methodologies are very important methodologies in the field of research and are applied in different scenarios mainly depending on the type of data to be collected in the research. To compare the two, we can say the two methodologies are similar in the sense that they help the researchers to collect their desired data and analyze it as required to get the desired outcomes of their research. Both methodologies are very important in the research process and make the research successful if conducted as required and by competent researchers. The two methodologies are also different where the main difference lies on the type of data collected or used in each methodology. As already said above, in quantitative methodology, numerical type of data is collected and analyzed and so the desired results are always given in numerical form, and this numerical data can be used to prepare some charts or graphs to enhance the representation and visualization of the results. On the other hand, the type of data collected and analyzed in qualitative methodology is normally given in non-numerical form, which means the types of data collected and analyzed in the two methodologies are completely different. Another notable difference occurs in the methods of data analysis employed in the two methodologies. As said above, some mathematical and statistical analysis methods which may involve the use of some special statistical or mathematical software packages are employed in analyzing data in quantitative methodology, and this makes the analysis methods employed in quantitative methodology very complex and very different from the simple methods employed in analyzing qualitative data used in qualitative methodology. The types of data used in the two methodologies and the complexity of the data analysis methods employed are the two major differences between these two common methodologies.

Types of Methodology

It’s good to note that when the researchers have to use both numerical and non-numerical data in their research, the use hybrid methodology which allows them to collect and analyze the two types of data in their research (Di, Lefons, and Tangorra, 2015, pp.135-160).

In our research, we shall choose the hybrid methodology since we shall collect and analyze both numerical and non-numerical types of data. The hybrid methodology will help us to save time and costs of the research. Instead of using different personnel and allocating different times for carrying out qualitative and quantitative methodologies differently, the two methodologies will be combined in the hybrid methodology, and this will greatly reduce the time and the costs which could have been used to conduct the two methodologies separately.

As discussed above, there are many problems faced by the society as a result of the rise of usage of internet in the modern world. One of the many problems faced is addiction where many people have been addicted and spend most of their time on the internet forgetting to do their assigned duties. In this section, we shall consider addiction as our main sub-problem resulting from the increased use of the internet and social media platforms. The problem of internet and social media addiction is a major problem affecting our societies in a great way and thus is worth to be discussed.

An analysis of the selected methodologies

Literature 1: Tracking the use and addiction to the internet in Australia

As already said earlier, the use of internet in the world has been increasing rapidly over the last few years. The increased use of the internet has also been recorded in Australia where many people both the young and the old have embraced the internet very well and started using it for most of their life activities. The Internet is of great importance and has many benefits for the users. One of the main uses of the internet is research where people can visit different websites to research on different issues they wish to understand. Another main use of the internet is for entertainment purposes where people use it to get entertained in various ways. There are many games, music, movies, among many other entertaining features found on the internet. These two main uses of the internet have made it very addictive especially to the youths who enjoy being entertained. Many youths will spend the whole day watching and listening to music, watching movies, and enjoying many games offered by the internet. This behavior has ended up addicting most of them, and today, we have many youths addicted to the internet.

Australia is one of those countries where many people both the young and the old have been addicted to the internet. We researched in one of the major Australian towns to understand the use of the internet and how the people are addicted. The table below tabulates the data we collected in our research where 1000 internet users (500 male users and 500 female users) participated in the research.

Quantitative and Qualitative Methodologies

The table of results of the first research

Age group	Number of participants	Average number of hours spent on the internet in a day
0 – 5 hours	5 – 10 hours	10 – 15 hours	Over 15 hours
10 – 20 years	200	12 participants	27 participants	78 participants	83 participants
20 – 30 years	200	2 participants	28 participants	78 participants	92 participants
30 – 40 years	200	44 participants	82 participants	39 participants	35 participants
40 – 50 years	200	55 participants	86 participants	43 participants	16 participants
Over 50 years	200	95 participants	74 participants	22 participants	9 participants

From the table above, it’s clear that we have many people both the young and the old who have been addicted to the internet. The people spending over 15 hours on the internet on a daily basis are highly addicted to the internet as they spend most of their time on the internet, and most of them forget to attend to their daily duties. The findings of our research agree with the national statistics which says that about 88% of the Australians use the internet today, and almost 20% of the active internet users are addicted to the internet where the largest percentage of the addicted people are the youths most of whom are 15 to 35 years.

Literature 2: Tracking the use and addiction of the social media in Australia

As already said, the internet has many uses which makes it highly addictive. The internet supports various social media platforms and these platforms have ended up addicting many internet users. Facebook and Twitter are among the main social media platforms which have very many users across the whole globe, and the Australians are among those people who use these social media platforms greatly. Many Australians, both the young and the old have ended up being addicted to the social media. We conducted another research to determine the use and the addiction of the social media in another major town in Australia. Just like in the previous research, we had 1000 social media users who participated where 500 of them were male participants, and the other 500 were females. The table below summarizes the results of the research.

The table of results of the second research

Age group	Number of participants	Average number of hours spent on the social media in a day
0 – 6 hours	6 – 12 hours	Over 12 hours
10 – 20 years	200	56 participants	66 participants	78 participants
20 – 30 years	200	62 participants	58 participants	80 participants
30 – 40 years	200	69 participants	97 participants	34 participants
40 – 50 years	200	91 participants	86 participants	23 participants
Over 50 years	200	95 participants	84 participants	21 participants

The people who use the social media for more than 12 years in a day can be said to be addicted to the social media. From the results of our research, we can see that we have a good number of some social media users especially the young users (40 years and below) who spend most of their time on the social media. These people have been addicted to the internet which is a great problem to their societies and to the entire country.

Literature 1 is very relevant to our sub-problem. Our sub-problem was on the addiction problem caused by the internet, and this literature has helped us to understand how many people especially the youths have been addicted to the internet. This literature is very important and can help us to come up with some measures which can be used to address the addiction problem.

Literature 2 is also very relevant and important in our sub-problem of addiction. The literature helps us to understand how the social media has affected many people especially the youths and the appropriate measures need to be taken to address this social media addiction problem.

Table 4: A table showing a summary of the reviewed methodologies

Literature	Research problem	Methodology	The sub-problem	Relevance
Literature 1	The internet and social media problem	Quantitative	Internet addiction	Strongly relevant
Literature 2	The internet and social media problem	Quantitative	Social media addiction	Strongly relevant

As already stated, we chose hybrid methodology which combines both quantitative and qualitative methodologies to achieve better and more efficient results. The proposed methodology is divided into three subsections where each subsection defines a different aspect of the methodology. These subsections are the justification of the methodology, the limitations and the benefits of the methodology, and finally the framework or the procedural steps of the methodology.

The hybrid methodology was used in this paper to overcome the limitations associated with either quantitative or qualitative methodologies. With hybrid methodology, the collection and analysis of any type of data encountered in the research will be done easily and efficiently.

Benefits

Allows the researchers to interact with the respondents (participants) of the research directly.

Reliable data is corrected since the data comes directly from the respondents.

It’s cheap and saves time since both qualitative and quantitative methodologies are done together as one.

Some people may give incorrect information

The analysis of the collected data can be quite challenging.

This methodology requires highly experienced researchers to conduct it correctly 

The framework/diagram above can be used to give a summary of our methodology paper. The diagram shows that the internet and the social media problem is the main problem of our research. The main problem is split into two sub-problems, the internet addiction sub-problem and the social media addiction sub-problem. The diagram also reveals that these sub-problems are more serious to the younger generation (about 20 to 40 years) and less serious to the older generations. 

References

Anand, N., Thomas, C., Jain, P.A., Bhat, A., Thomas, C., Prathyusha, P.V., Aiyappa, S., Bhat, S., Young, K. and Cherian, A.V., 2018. Internet use behaviors, internet addiction and psychological distress among medical college students: A multicentre study from South India. Asian journal of psychiatry, 37, pp.71-77.

Bozarth, L. and Budak, C., 2017. Is Slacktivism Underrated? Measuring the Value of Slacktivists for Online Social Movements. In ICWSM (pp. 484-487).

Carr, C.T. and Hayes, R.A., 2015. Social media: Defining, developing, and divining. Atlantic Journal of Communication, 23(1), pp.46-65.

Chen, W., Paik, I., and Hung, P.C., 2015. Constructing a global social service network for better quality of web service discovery. IEEE transactions on services computing, 8(2), pp.284-298.

Di, T.F., Lefons, E. and Tangorra, F., 2015. Academic data warehouse design using a hybrid methodology. Computer Science and Information Systems, 12(1), pp.135-160.

Harmon, B., 2014. The crisscrossed agency of a toast: Personhood, individuation, and de?individuation in Luzhou, China. The Australian Journal of Anthropology, 25(3), pp.357-372.

Heck, R.H. and Thomas, S.L., 2015. Quantitative methodology series. An introduction to multilevel modeling techniques: MLM and SEM approaches using Mplus New York, NY, US.

Noveck, B.S., 2017. Five hacks for digital democracy. Nature, 544(7650), pp.287-289.

Perrin, A., 2015. Social media usage. Pew research center, pp.52-68.

Rao, B.R., 2016. Social networking website system with automatic registration based on location information. U.S. Patent 9,246,708.

Taylor, S.J., Bogdan, R. and DeVault, M., 2015. Introduction to qualitative research methods: A guidebook and resource. John Wiley & Sons.

Tiago, M.T.P.M.B. and Veríssimo, J.M.C., 2014. Digital marketing and social media: Why bother? Business Horizons, 57(6), pp.703-708.

Van den Heuvel, C., 2017. Building society, constructing knowledge, weaving the Web: Otlet’s visualizations of a global information society and his concept of a universal civilization. In European modernism and the information society (pp. 141-168). Routledge.

Zuckerberg, M. and Sittig, A., Facebook Inc, 2015. Mapping relationships between members in a social network. U.S. Patent 9,183,599.