Assignments: Comparing Research Methods

Unit title: Research for creative media production

Introduction:

For this assignment I will compare, contrast and evaluate different research methods

·       Primary research

Interviews

focus groups

questionnaires

Surveys

·       Secondary research

Newspapers

Books

Internet

Magazines

 

 

 For this unit we’ve been learning research methods for creative media production, we’ve been taught about primary research and secondary research. Primary research is open research where you gather information from other people such from interviews, reviews, focus groups. Secondary research is second information that you'll find in books and the internet.

Interviews are form of primary research when you have face to face conversation with interviewer when you apply for job, college or university, the interviewer will ask number of question to find out information about you and to find out if you are suited for the job or not. The advantages of interview is the interviewer can gather information and get to know the interviewee, it produce high response rates but disadvantages is that some interviewees might be nervous during the interview and the interviewer will gather less information from the person, the interviewer may be biased.

Questionnaires are closed questions and there are given out to people to  answer and it's fast useful way to collect data from people, the advantages of questionnaires is that large amount of information can be collected within minutes from people who are taking them.

Focus groups is form of primary and qualitative research is where everyone is in group and they share about their opinions, personal preferences and their beliefs, the advantages of focus group is it generates results quicker, they save time and money compare to interviews and the disadvantages are that some people In the focus group might have lower confidence which could generate a low results.

Newspapers are printed publication they are form of secondary research they advertise what's going on around the world, they also offer vouchers, questionnaires, word searches and advertisements. The most popular news papers are daily mirror, daily mail, the sun, the guardian and the daily telegraph but newspapers are getting outdated now as more people are reading on Smartphone/tablet. The advantages of new paper is you can find what's going on around the world, they can be read anywhere, they really cheap to buy and you can often get vouchers. The disadvantages of newspaper is that the press can make up stories on there and it's a way of Newspaper Company making more money of people, they use up a lot of paper.

A survey is both quantitative and qualitative research, surveys are made there for customers to fill in and answer questionnaires about their service to gain feedback. Then they usually publish it on graph and count up how many people find their service positive or negative. The advantages of surveys that they are cheap, collects reasonable data from group of people, they are easy and doesn’t cost much to design it. The disadvantages are that some customers don’t provide honest responses, Surveys with closed questions may have lower validate rates than open question.

Quantitative research is numerical research such as finding ratings of your favourite film/ TV show, the amount of viewers on YouTube videos, amount of likes you've got on your facebook photo or status. Plotting data on excel spreadsheet and making it into pie chart and bar chart or graphs shows the mathematical data (from movie, TV show ect) which is collected.