With a majority of our respondents having some sort of income or financial assistance, most of them can afford to have phone lines which could be a factor in why such personal means are preferred. Another thing is that some of them can't afford their own computers so even though there is usually easy access to computers in labs and libraries, the amount of time one can spend on Facebook, and the internet as a whole, is effected
Regarding our sampling method, one could say we cheated the stratified random selection of our sample because we made sure we had twenty students and twenty employees. Then we made sure we chose an equal amount males and females. However, we can say that there was indeed randomization because once we found our students and employees and found groups of males and females from each category; we randomly selected males and females from those gender groups.
We believe the content validity, which is concerned with the coverage quality of the covered content (i.e. how much time is spent on Facebook), is decent because we cover a wide variety of dependent variables (number of hours spent on Facebook, which methods of communication are used). During the research study as a whole, we had a great amount of inter-observer reliability. Even though Deneem and myself worked independently most of the time and had different samples (she worked with the students, I worked with the employees), we gained similar, correlating results.
With there being hundreds of students at Loyalist, a few hundred Quinte Mall employees and only a total of forty respondents in our study, it can be argued that our study lacks generalizability. If we had a larger sample of chosen students and employees, our findings would be more applicable to larger populations of students and employees.
Some limiting factors during our study included time. Different aspects of research take more time than others so with a limited amount of time; we had to be very time-orientated. We also made our own, and tried to meet, personal deadlines to ensure everything would get done within an appropriate timeframe. Another limiting factor was the availability of the people within our samples. Most of our students did not hesitate to take the time to fill out our questionnaire. With the employees, some new respondents had to be selected because some of the originally selected employees were unable to participate because of being too busy or because of rules set by their place of employment.
Ethical considerations included anonymity. With the questionnaires being anonymous, respondents would be more likely to write down truthful answers than if they had to write their name with their answers. We also gave respondents rights of privacy by not asking in-depth questions such as what exactly they do or talk about when communicating with others.
