Write up a 500 word summary on what you have learned this week defining the purposes:

Primary research is not always the first place you go first when doing your research as it is more useful to see what other people have said about the topic you are researching first.  You first conduct your secondary research and then build what you found from your primary research which is new research, carried out to answer specific issues or questions. It can involve questionnaires, surveys or interviews with individuals or small groups. Some of the Drawbacks of primary research would be that it is expensive to conduct and mostly time consuming whereas, some of the benefits may be that it is tailor made and that the completion does not have any access to it.

Secondary research is the first type of research you conduct, this can be anything from; academic resources, newspapers, magazines, television resources or even books. The most reliable type of secondary research is most likely to be academic resources that are written by professionals from universities. The benefits from having secondary research is that is can be quick by gathering online data whereas the drawbacks may be that it is out of date.

Qualitative research is used to gain an understanding of underlying reasons, opinions, personal responses, tastes, beliefs, experiments and motivations. It provides insights into the problem or helps to develop ideas for the hypothesis, some methods can be through focus groups and interviews. Some of the drawbacks for this would be that it ca be biased as it is people’s opinions and not actual facts and figures.

 

Quantitative research collection methods are much more structured than Qualitative data collection methods. This research is related to facts and figures which makes the results more reliable as it isn’t opinions that is collected and this can be through structured techniques such as online questionnaires, surveys or interviews. A disadvantage is that if there isn’t a large sample then the results will not be reliable; the larger the sample of people researched, the more statistically accurate the results will be.    

In research terms a sample is a group of people, objects, or items that are taken from a larger population for measurement. The sample should be representative of the population to ensure that we can generalize the findings, when doing a sample you should consider age and gender to ensure that there is a variation in the findings.

Open questions are questions that cannot be answered with a yes or no and requires a developed answer which may need time to think about the answer and allows people to go into interesting detail with opinions.

Closed questions gives the person interviewed a limited choice such as ‘yes’ or ‘no’, ‘good’ or ‘bad’, ‘true’ or ‘false’, ‘agree’ or disagree’ etc. These types of questions would usually be used in a survey or questionnaire as they are quick and easy questions to ask.