So for this week I started to look for quantitative and case-study research in some of the Sound and Music Computing related journals (e.g. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, IEEE Transactions on Audio, Speech and Language Processing). But it proved very hard to find this kind of research in this field. During the exercise it was said that qualitative methods was less popular in this more engineering oriented field. In "regular" Media Technology it is more popular as it incorporates more humanistic and social sciences. Still, Sound and Music Computing has a lot of incorporation of e.g. music psychology so I expected that there would be at least some papers. It might be because I only searched for the title. My gut feeling is that people don't tend to put their method in the title and that might be a possible explanation.
As I see it there is no distinct boundary between qualitative and quantitative research. Both kinds have their pros and cons and may be combined or compared in many ways. A researcher should try to find suitable methods for their research without any prejudice. The most relevant method(s) for some research may be more or less suitable, but never predetermined. When I start doing my master thesis I will try to explore different methods and find which ones are suitable. As I most likely will do my thesis within the Sound and Music Computing field I will find that almost all previous research is quantitative (or maybe not) but this shouldn't hinder me from choosing another method. However, one might argue that in order to be taken seriously within a field one should use the canonical methods. Perhaps combining methods is the way to get away with using qualitative methods in a quantitative-dominated field or vice-versa.
Inga kommentarer:
Skicka en kommentar