Recognising Research Methods

I have been scan reading a educational paper called Unfolding Understandings: Co-designing UbiComp in Situ, Over Time. In this paper a research team explain how they developed a different tourism experience using Ubiquitous Computing (UbiComp) at Chawton House.

The Research they did was split into four workshops to do their research. In the first workshop they held meetings and discussed with the current the current practices of tours being given at the present time, and to see where the current staff boundaries lay. The used a map of the grounds to pinpoint key areas of interest. The majority of the methods used in this workshop i believe were qualitative as they're are no figures to be quoted from holding discussions. Depending on how they used the map though this could count as a quantitative method as they could have figures to back up the areas of interest.

In the second workshop the 3 staff gave separate tours to two researchers each, 1 of the researchers in each group videoed the tour. This collated a group of stories and audio clips that could be used later in development. In this workshop again the methods of research seem to be more qualitative as it is use of observations and recording and the research team could pick and chose the audio clips they found most interesting to use. Of course by videoing everything depending on how they analysed the tapes quantitative data could be produced from them, e.g. 2 out of the 3 staff mentioned this story we must include it

In the third workshop the methods used were more to get the Chawton House staff on side, as they showed a demonstration another similar project they had worked on and a prototype tour where researchers took the staff on a tour playing audio clips from a laptop. This again seems qualitative.

After this workshop a working model was implemented for a school fieldtrip, again researchers videoed what the children were doing and how they were using the system, Then after the field trip they interviewed some of the staff. These methods are essentially qualitative as it is observations and interviews, but again depending on how the video recording was used quantitative data could be pulled from it examples could have included all the children knew how to use this function, only 1 child could figure out how to record data. This sort of data would let you know how to improve your system and make it more usable.

Then in the final workshop it was a review of the fieldtrip, the Chawton House Staff took the tours on the working system set for a more adult friendly tour. And more discussions were made on how to progress from there.