Q
uestion: Name a topic in your field of study that you might explore with a nonexperimental study. Which type of nonexperimental study would be most appropriate for your topic?
My field of study is computer networking and telecommunication. A topic I’m interested in and might do a study over is with security such as “What percentage of internet users are using outdated web browser versions?” The most appropriate type of nonexperimental study would be quantitative research, this would involve gathering data over each visitor from webserver logs.
I agree that a nonexperimental study would work here. I cannot think of any type of experiment that would make sense for this research question. The best you can do is collect the information on what outdated web browser versions are being used and compare them to up-to-date versions. This would be done best through quantitative research since that data would be relatively easy to collect and could be used to further a hypothesis on the matter.
I think the study Benjamin suggests is closest to the survey method mentioned in topic six. That’s the closest research method suggested by your text, but still a little off.
The end result of the study would be to “describe the … behaviors of a population” (p. 19 of VitalSource text). However, surveys usually involve asking people questions, not simple data collection.
I think the study is better described as content analysis. The book doesn’t cover that method, but Wikipedia did have a good description of that method as “the study of documents and communication artifacts” (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_analysis).
Communication and media scholars probably use content analysis more frequently than computer networkers, but if you are looking at logs, that is a text or document.
And to clarify the types of nonexperimental research in the text, all research is either quantitative and/or qualitative. Research is usually one or the other, but Topic 51 covers “mixed methods,” which uses both.
The specific nonexperimental methods mentioned in Topic 6 are Causal-comparative methods, surveys or polls, correlational research, and historical research. There are more nonexperimental methods that the second text may cover, such as focus groups and content analysis.