Theme 4: Quantitative research

Online conversation and corporate reputation: A two-wave longitudinal study on the effects of exposure to the social media activities of a highly interactive company

1. Which quantitative method or methods are used in the paper? Which are the benefits and limitations of using these methods?
2. What did you learn about quantitative methods from reading the paper?
3. Which are the main methodological problems of the study? How could the use of the quantitative method or methods have been improved?

In this paper Dijkmans et al. (2015) have a hypothesis concerning how companies communicate via social media. They write that:

“… we hypothesize that conversational human voice mediates the effect of exposure to a company's social media activities on consumers' perceived corporate reputation.”

To simplify: How companies communicate on social media affects the way they are being perceived.

The company they contacted in order to do their study was KLM Royal Dutch Airlines.

1. They used different quantitative methods to answer different questions. However they were all based on using Likert-type scales in order to answer their questions on for example corporate reputation, which means how the participants perceived the company. They had a method to divide this perception in to six dimensions (emotional appeal, products & services, vision & leadership, workplace environment, social & environmental responsibility, and financial performance) accordingly to earlier studies. There were 18 statements to collect data about the 6 dimensions; each dimension was represented by 3 of the 18 statements. The participants answered by choosing alternatives from a Likert-type scale that ranged from 1-5 where 1 = “strongly disagree” and 5 = “strongly agree”.
    
   Benefits:
   This method provided numbers to perception, which for example makes correlations between how something is perceived with for how long it is being perceived possible. As in this case, where the participants also answered a question of how exposed they were to the company´s social media activities.
    
   Limitations:
   In this case there was a limitation in that they asked if the participants had been exposed to the company´s activities on Facebook and Twitter, meaning that these were the only representatives in the data regarding social media sites. Furthermore how the participants had interacted with the companies, actively by communicating with the companies or passively by being exposed to the companies messages, was not reflected in the data.
    
2. That they can enable a mathematical representation of more “abstract” data, such as how a corporation is being perceived.
    
3. A part from what I wrote in “Limitations” above:
    
   When presenting their discussion it says that there were implications concerning a question on the participants’ appreciation of the company’s activity on the different social media sites. To answer this question the participants were able to choose from a scale of 1-11. However there was an error and not all of the participants could view the alternative that meant “I do not follow KLM on this site” and afterwards there was an unexpectedly high percentage of answers that corresponded to a negative appreciation of the sites in the data from the first year.

Drumming in Immersive Virtual Reality: The Body Shapes the Way We Play

I thought this paper had an interesting discussion on virtual body ownership illusion and I thought that the method of collecting data was interesting.

1. Which are the benefits and limitations of using quantitative methods?

Quantitative methods use mathematics to represent and interpret data. They make it easier to find potential correlations or differences between data. Another example is that quantitative data enables collecting data from perceptions and movements (Kilteni, 2012). However these types of data are also being limited by being quantified. Not all aspects of movements or perceptions are possible to quantify. This data cannot explain the meaning of an action or what the intention behind it is.

1. Which are the benefits and limitations of using qualitative methods?

Qualitative methods enable researchers to gather data to questions like why people act in certain ways or what intention they had with their action. To collect qualitative data means to ask people about what they perceive to be the answer. Therefore it is not necessarily easy to find correlations in the data and generalizations can be more difficult to make.    

 

References:

Dijkmans, C., Kerkhof, P., Buyukcan-Tetik, A. and Beukeboom, C. J. (2015). Online conversation and corporate reputation: A two-wave longitudinal study on the effects of exposure to the social media activities of a highly interactive company. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication.

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jcc4.12132/full

Kilteni, K., Bergstrom and Slater, M. (2012). Drumming in Immersive Virtual Reality: The Body Shapes the Way We Play.

https://www.kth.se/social/files/56000bc9f2765448c25c5279/Drumming%20in%20Immersive%20Virtual%20Reality.pdf