There are four different methods of research:
- Primary
- Secondary
- Quantitative
- Qualitative
Primary is research you find and carry out yourself. It involves using questionnaire's/survey's, interviews, foucus groups, word and mouth, letter's, email, textual analysis etc.
Adavntages:
- You can research exactly what you want, how you want, and don't have to rely on other peoples work.
- You can interpret the results how you want, and dont need to rely on other peoples interpretations.
- The research will be accurate for the current time / place / situation you are studying.
- It is tailored exactly to your needs.
- It can take a lot of time and cost a lot of money to conduct primary research
- You might not always have the necessary things to conduct it, e.g. samples etc.
Advantages:
- It is often cheaper than doing primary research.
- It may allow you access to data you could not otherwise get.
- You may have less control over how the data was collected.
- There may be biases in the data that you don't know about.
- Its answers may not exactly fit your research questions.
- It may be obsolete data.
Quantitative research is to do with numbers and looking for patterns and trends. The methods you would use questionnaires, survey's etc.
Advantages:
- Quantitive data is in great quantity
- Cheap to manufacture
- Easier to answer
- The context of the study or experiment is ignored
- It not study things in a natural setting or discuss the meaning things have for different people
Qualitative research is finding out people's opinions and responces in a structerd way.
Disadvantages:
- The questions by researchers can lead to the people being asked to be interviewers desirability bias, where the data actually reflects the view of the researcher instead of the participating subject.
- Time consuming
- Can be expensive
Advantages:
- Qualitative data is detailed
- You can obtain insight in the respondent's own voice and they will be able to go into detail in their own words
- You can discover new ideas which may help drive innovation by exploring a topic or idea
From this information I will use mainly primary research by using word of mouth, questionnaires and textual analysis. This is because I can tailor the questions and research to my genre and ideas. I will then use Quantitative research to look for numbers and trends from the primary research I have used, such as questionnaires. By using Quantitative research it will give me a more accurate opinion on what people think on specific genre's etc. Therefore I can have a better external opinion on what I will do.
I will least likely use Qualitative research because it is more structured and can be time consuming to find out simple questions that I can find out by doing other methods of research, i.e. primary research, Quantitative research. Even though Qualitative research enables you to gain detailed information, I can still gain detailed information by using Secondary research.
