Research Methods

In our lecture we looked at research methods and how you could collect information, whether it be primary or secondary. By using methodology to collect information you can be exact in what you want to find out, for example a focus group can help a researcher gain feedback on a idea or existing product. However, when considering what type of research method you want to use you need to consider the pros and cons of each, for example a covert observation may work for a social experiment however could also be considered unethical. Ethics is a topic that should heavily be considered when doing research as a researcher doesn't want to harm the participants as this could have negative impacts on the results of the research but also a researchers reputation.

We also learnt the difference between quantitate and qualitative research as well as primary and secondary research.

• Quantitative data; This is data that is collected through speech/written answers, it's non-numerical data. Information you'd collect through focus groups, spoken interviews. etc
• Quantitative data; Any data that is numerical/statistics, the benefits of this is you can easily transfer this into something like a pie chart to be visually representative of the data. 
• Primary Research; Any new data that you collect yourself first hand. The benefits of this is you can research into any area and go to the level of depth you need for your research. 
• Secondary Research; This is where you do research and look at data that already exists, so you can gather research from previous studies etc. This research is usually easily accessible from online so is easily accessible. 

To exemplify primary research, we conducted a focus group within our class (qualitative data) and asked questions on a the subject of brushing teeth! As people took part in this focus group we uncovered facts and information about peoples personal lives. However as a audience watching the focus group we noticed some issues, for example when a open discussion was happening within the focus group some people were less inclined to speak, so your sample is important because you want a representative sample but you also want to allocate time evenly to allow everyone to be able to talk and share their thoughts so you