What this blog is about: This blog is devoted to quantitative research methods for communication students. The materials of this page provide a short hands-on introduction to descriptive and inferential statistics and some of the basic visualizations. The focus is on content analysis and survey designs. Some other topics, such as data mining and network analysis are shortly discussed as well. The idea of this blog is not to serve as a comprehensive guide to any method, but rather to introduce the topics and suggest some further resources.

What can you find here: The blog is divided into the  “News” section devoted to course-related information and four individual sections which appear as different pages of the blog. The first section, “Quantitative research”, covers some very basic protocols and starting points for developing a research design for quantitative research in communication. The second section, “Methods”, introduces the basics of such methodological approaches as content analysis, surveys, and network analysis. The third section, “Data”, discusses different issues related to data gathering and sources of data. The fourth section, “Analysis”, has most of the core contents of the page with discussions of descriptive and inferential statistics and basic visualizations.

Disclaimer: The material on this page is produced for and aimed at the students of the International Master’s Degree Programme in Media and Global Communication (MGC) at the Department of Social Research (Media and Communication Studies) at the University of Helsinki. The materials are prepared for pedagogical purposes. The author(s) of this page take no responsibility for matters arising from the content’s accuracy or the presented results in the examples. However, the page is open for everyone, and thus whoever finds the materials beneficial or interesting in any ways is free to use them. Note that all the written materials are licensed under the Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 Generic.

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