Theme 4 - Before

Doing Radio, making friends, and having fun: Exploring the motivations of independent audio podcasters

By K. Markman. New Media & Society, June 2012.
It is an exploratory paper about the podcast medium, specifically what motivates podcasting.

1. For this paper they used a survey to collect data. A survey can be either qualitative or quantitative depending on the questions used. In this case they used mainly open ended questions. And they do mention early on that they focused on the qualitative part.

I would say that generally the benefit of a qualitative survey like this is that you can get very detailed responses. This is exemplified with the questions that were asked in this case, for example “What made you decide to start podcasting?”. What the researchers are looking for is a personal motivation, and that is something you can get much more accurately with an open ended question like this. A quantitative alternative would have been to provide multiple responses and the persons would check the option that fit most closely. A limitation is that going through and interpreting the answers take much more time than if you provide multiple answers. The researchers had to go through and scrutinize all answers and code the different motives manually.

2. I would say I learned a little by reading their pretty detailed chapter about how they themselves conducted their research. They describe the process and how they went about advertising the survey to collect responses in various steps, so in that way the early parts of the paper can act as a guide to a conduct a similar survey. Some general things I have learned are also that formulating questions is very important, the questions in this case are based on “What...?” and are not leading.

3. A thing that I thought might be a problem is that a part of advertising the survey was that the authors posted about it on Facebook groups for podcasters and public forums. In doing this in a public setting you are not guaranteed to reach your focus group since everyone can read it, and I felt that may have lead to responses from people who were not in fact part of the target group. That and making the submissions anonymous may have at least enabled such responses. Keeping it through private channels, like they did also use (direct email), would have kept it more controlled.

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

This paper was about actDresses, a way to physically communicate with “consumer robots” of different kinds. Three examples are given through how this can be used to interact with a pet robot dinosaur (Pleo), glowbots and a robotic vacuum cleaner.

The subject was new to me, and the paper was built in a way that I haven’t seen before and differed a great deal from what I am accustomed to seeing in a scientific paper. I am guessing this ties into the fifth theme - design research. The paper introduces a concept and with the three different robots provide examples for how it can be used.

It was interesting reading it, I think it is a nice concept and the reasons for examining it was made most clear to me in the example with Pleo. Since the consumers tended to interact with Pleo in a social way that you would with a pet there must be a better way to control it (and similar robots) than using a computer as mediator. Putting a pyjamas on it to make it sleep, for instance, is not immersion breaking for the person interacting with it. And more fun. :)

Question:

Is there a generally accepted way to know what constitutes low and high response rates to qualitative surveys, or does it depend completely on the information that is sought?