Mobile News Adoption among Young Adults - Examining the Roles of Perceptions - Research Paper Example

Analytical Evaluation of Research Methodology Author’s Name Grade course Institution Tutor Date The aim of the study was to identify motivational predictors of mobile news consumption among young adults. The research approach applied by the researchers was a quantitative research approach where the data collected for the dependent and control variables were converted into numerical forms and then later statistical calculations were made on these data. Conclusions were later drawn based on these statistical calculations. Internal and external validity is important for any study and the authors of this study took steps to ensure the overall validity. For internal validity, the researchers carried out a pretest before the main study began but they did not mention if any changes were made to the survey questions. However, the fact that they conducted a pretest study shows that one can confidently conclude that changes in the dependent variables were as a result of just the independent variables and not extraneous ones. The measurement methods were also consistent for all variables that were to be measured as the researchers used regression methods throughout their data analysis. However, the study’s external validity could not be determined because data collection focused entirely on college student between the ages of 18 and 24. This is despite the fact that young adults population that the study was supposed to focus on is comprised of people between ages 18 and 29. The population in the 25-29 years age bracket was not represented at all in the study. As such, the results could not be replicated and generalized to the entire young adults’ population. The can be attributed to the fact that subjects were not chosen randomly because the nature of a quantitative research demands that sampling be purposeful. What makes the quantitative approach applied by the researchers strong is the objectivity with which they conducted the study. By making it an online survey, the study ensured that there was very little of the researchers’ presence and behaviour that would threaten to affect the results. Since quantitative studies are more prone to bias, successfully avoiding bias by the researchers was also another strength of this methodological approach. On the limitations of the quantitative approach, despite the fact that they carried out a pretest study, they did not mention whether the review of the question wording was carried out by an independent person/body so as to avoid phrasing bias. If they could have made this clear in the data collection section of the report, it would have cleared the study of any phrasing bias. However, as it is, it is difficult to ascertain whether biasness in this area was prevented. Another limitation of this approach is that since it required data collected to be reduced to numbers, a lot of raw information was lost. This is because once data is turned into numerical form, reversing it to its original form is not possible. Due to the nature of the research approach that the researchers took - quantitative approach- they were required to not randomize the sample of the population that was under study. It is true that random and probability sampling will reduce sampling error; however, this sampling would not have been representative of the population that was supposed to be studied. The findings of the study needed to represent young adults and therefore sampling had to be purposeful and direct. However, it should be noted that since the participants were drawn from a large university, the 384 subjects who participated in the online survey for the final survey may have not be representative of the entire young adults population. As such, a sampling error might have occurred here and the results may not have been reliable. This could have probably been avoided by increasing the duration within which the study should have been conducted. This would have allowed more subjects to participate in the online survey. In the end, this possible sampling error as a result of a non-representative sample may have resulted to a negative external validity. In order to measure the validity and reliability of the study’s tools, the researchers undertook certain steps. On reliability, a test-retest reliability test via the pretest that was conducted prior to the final survey. This was an important step because unreliable constructs would result in unreliable outcomes which would render the study useless as regards the recommendations suggested from the findings. Since reliability goes hand in hand with validity, the latter must be measured carefully to ensure that the study is wholly reliable and valid. However, the study does not mention anywhere if an independent person/body with little interest in the study, was approached to review the outcome of the pretest. This puts the reader at crossroads because one is not able to clearly determine whether the research is valid or not. Data collection for the study was majorly from the millennial generation because this is the generation that spends most of their time on their mobile phones for one reason or the other. This generation is comprised of young adults between the ages of 18 to 29. The study, however, focused on college students between ages 18 to 24 during data collection. The reason behind this is that it was a representative group of the millennial generation and that the students in this bracket were full time students and thus easy to track within the campus. As with any other kind of research, a pretest was important to test the reliability of the tools of analysis to be employed during the actual study. The validity of the research constructs would also be tested with the pretest. The pretest was carried out on a random sample of 54 undergraduate students in a bid to also find out if the wordings of the questions to be asked in the main study needed changing. This was important because ambiguous questions would give different meanings making results invalid to the study at hand. After the pretest and confirmation that the research constructs were valid, data collection began on 755 students with 384 of this representative sample participating online. It should be noted that 755 participants was a good representative number of the entire introductory course student population. The data collected was inspired by the multiplicity approach and they included the level of mobile news usage i.e. frequency, intensity of adoption, timing of adoption and monetary investment on mobile news. The collection of this data commenced on March 2011. The design of the study was cross-sectional because it was a study meant to come up with findings at a particular point in time. Time period for collection of data was also not extended over a period of time. Rather, it was conducted over a short period as it required just the feeling of online questionnaires and no observation was required. The selection of sample participants was also not random because cross-sectional studies just need to identify differences existing between the purposefully selected samples against another group. In this case, the study was looking to identify motivational factors for news adoption for young adults as compared to adults. There were both controlled variables and dependent variables in the data that was collected by the researchers. The dependent variables were timing of the adoption, frequency of mobile news usage, time spent using mobile news and the willingness to spend money for mobile news. On the other hand, the controlled variables in the study were level of education, age, ethnicity, marital status, income as well as gender. The importance of the researchers collecting controlled variables and observing them as carefully as the dependent variables was to make sure that the change did not occur to them. Any changes to the control variables would consequently change the responses by participants thereby giving wrong results and findings. In the long run, recommendations proposed would not be reliable. Data to be collected needed to directly answer the levels of mobile news adoption by young adults. The data collected included level of mobile news usage, intensity of adoption, timing of adoption and monetary investment on mobile news was important to the study and specifically to the sample participants. As the Pew Research Center observed, mobile devices have become inseparable with the millennial generation. All these variables could relate directly to this generation because they could adapt to mobile devices easily, they used mobile devices frequently and they spent money on mobile device services. Any other data such as ownership of any sort of mobile device may have been collected but they would have less significant weight when it came to the answering of the set hypotheses. The hypotheses of level of media usage, news consumption, mobile news usefulness, ease of mobile news use and the advantages of mobile news could only be proved or disproved using the data that was collected by the researchers. As mentioned earlier in the paper, quantitative research approaches are more prone to various forms of bias with one example being sampling bias. There are different ways in which a researcher can get a sample population for a study but it all depends on the type of research approach that the researcher decides to use based solely on the type of research to be conducted. For the current study, the researchers took a quantitative approach and as such were required to purposefully sample the population under study. The reason for this is that the study needed to focus on the young adults and random sampling would probably not have been representative of the young adults’ population. For the study, sampling bias was avoided by using a large number of sample, 775 contacted, and of this nearly half responded to the online survey. If a smaller sample number would have been used, then response would be so low as to give any meaningful findings. However, of the 775 subjects contacted, only 384 subjects participated in the online survey with only 376 responses getting analysed. This means that only slightly half of the entire sample population took part in the survey. The study reveals that the subjects were sampled from a large university and therefore it would be safe to conclude that the number of young adults within the age bracket that the researchers were focusing on must have been large. Therefore, a sample of only 386 responses could not be representative of the entire young adult population in the university. It can thus be deduced that systematic error must have occurred in the study. This is because since the sample was not representative of the young adult population in the universities, then the results from the sample would most likely be different from results taken from of the entire population under study. Taking all these factors into consideration, it would be fair to say that the researchers tried to minimize sampling bias by sampling 775 subjects. However, a response from just 386 subjects did not entirely eliminate sampling bias thereby reducing the probability of the results being generalized to other similar populations. References Chan-Olmsted, S., Rim, H., & Zerba, A. (2012). Mobile news adoption among young adults: examining the roles of perceptions, news consumption, and media usage. Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, 90(1), 126-147. Read More