Research Methods for DUMMIES

h c r a Rese s d o h Met

Learn to: Demonstrate your understanding of research methods; PRIMARY and SECONDARY QUANTITATIVE and QUALITATIVE

SOPHIA PANAYI Print Media Student

Primary And Secondary Research The two most known types of research methods are ‘primary’ and ‘secondary’.

Primary: Your own research carried out to answer specific issues or questions.

Examples of primary research: • Questionnaires • Surveys • Interviews with individuals/ small groups Secondary: Use of information previously researched by someone else for other purposes and is publicly available.

Includes: • Research reports in a library • Surveys • The Internet

QUANTITATIVE and QUALITATIVE Research Quantitative data comes from: Primary • Surveys Research • Laboratory Expreiments Secondary • Official Statistics Research

Qualitative data comes from: • Informal Interviews • Participant Observation • Letters

QUANTITATIVE : relating to, measuring, or measured by the quantity of something rather than its quality. It’s presented in numericle form.

QUALITATIVE : is primarily exploratory research. It is used to gain an understanding of underlying reasons, opinions, and motivations. It provides insights into the problem or helps to develop ideas or hypotheses for potential quantitative research. It is data that refers to indepth information shown by words.

observation

Focus Groups

Observation is recording how people behave in particular situations in a structured way. It’s good for discovering peoples behaviour e.g. what they do and not what they say that they do. Requires other peoples consent to be observed. This MUST be approached knowing that because these people know they are being observed they may behave differently. They aren’t appropriate for investigating people’s views.

Focus groups involve talking to people to find out their views and experiences, they are a type of qualitative research. They usually consist of 6 - 10 people in them. They are great for answering “why” and “how” questions and getting to the bottom of complex issues, collecting detailed data and they give insightful informataion from a small number of people. They can be bad because they require a lot of of time to collecting the data and due to this there tend to be categories to analyse.

Types of interviews

Secondary sources

There are different types of interviews and they are mostly qualatative data rather than being quantitative data. They can ne structured, semi structured or completely unstructured. They enable face to face discussions in which you can take notes, tape the interview, rely on your memory or write in their answers.

Different Research Methods

Using secondary sources is just like saying secondary research. It’s where you’ve gathered your information from somewhere else which can be bad because it may lack validity. No matter how accurate your own research is, it will never give you the exact results as the research you have gathered from elsewhere. This is another example of your research looking unreliable and not replicable.

questionnaires Questionnaires tend to be used in quantitative data and are presented in a numerical form This makes them easy to follow and reliable. The only negative towards them is that if someone can’t read the questions how are theysupposed to answer them. This makes the study less dependable.