After doing research on the different types of research used these are the main ones I have found:
- Primary research: gathering information yourself, this can be through doing questionnaires and surveys, interviews, focus group etc. The main benefits to primary research is that it's your own research so you can tailor the questions to make them suitable on what you want to find out, it's also inexpensive and you can get as much information as you want. However drawbacks to primary research are the fact it is time consuming when it comes to turning the research into data or sorting it out as well as this issue finding suitable people to interview etc. can be difficult and this can cause a problem because making sure you have the right type of people is important if you want to collect good data and information.
- Secondary research: looking through someone else's research this can be by looking at other magazines, newspapers, websites etc it can also be looking at previous data from previous questionnaires and applying them to yourself. These is beneficial because it can help you gather alot of different information as information is already out there, this can also be less time consuming in contrast to going out and collecting data yourself. However finding information from other peoples work isn't always reliable as it may be irrelevant data. For example if your doing a primary school magazine research secondary school magazines would provide you with some information that is irrelevant because the target audiences are different. Furthermore using secondary research makes you reliant on other peoples research and statistics which may not be accurate.
Within Secondary and Primary research I found that there were different ways to obtain information.
The main ways I researched:
Focus groups
Questionnaires
Online Surveys
Interview
These will all help me get my primary research done.
Focus groups usually involve getting a small number of people and asking them questions within that group, these are usually open questions which will allow me to ask more questions and allow my respondent(s) to open up on their thoughts and feelings, which may provide me with qualitative data. Interviews are similar but usually involve questioning one person. Both ways are often take a long time but they allow you to get a lot of qualitative data and opinions.
Online Surveys, I have the option of putting an online survey on my blog. This is similar to a questionnaire however it is often much shorter (usually one question) and it is better for collecting quantitative data as closed questions are usually asked. I think online surveys are useful as they can help me get a variety of respondents i.e different parts of the country.
Questionnaires are can be used to get qualitative or quantitative data. Usually you have a list of questions and you get as many people as you can to fill them in, these can be a mixture of open or closed questions.
What is the difference between qualitative and quantitative data?
Qualitative data usually involves answers and opinions.
Qualitative data can be put into figures that can be turned into pie charts and graphs etc.
What is the difference between an open and closed question?
Open questions are usually questions that require to the respondent to put more thought into their answer often they will be able to include their opinions and more information about themselves.
Closed questions are usually yes or no questions or have boxes if it is multiple choice. Closed questions are often easier to turn into data.
How has this research helped me?
After doing this research i have found different ways to collect data for my magazine which will help me. I will be doing mostly primary research because there isn't much infomation on school magazines out there already.
No comments:
Post a Comment