RESEARCH METHODS

When doing any kind of research you need to determine what type of research is most relevant to what you want to find out. There are four main types of research methods:

PRIMARY RESEARCH
This is the process of gathering information directly form individuals who have the data you are looking for. Primary research doesn't look at published information and will look at sources such as different types of people related to what you are researching. However primary research isn't always reliable as you are basing your results on what people are saying, and in some cases people could lie or misunderstand the question giving you incorrect information.

SECONDARY RESEARCH
Secondary research (also known as desk research) is when you collect and summarise existing research rather that collecting new data (like in primary research). This method is usually used when you can't find the information you are looking for or it doesn't exist. This information is usually collected from websites or information books about the subject you are looking at. This method can be good as it is time affective and is very cheap to carry out. However, because you aren't carrying out the experiments/questionnaires it could be less specific to what you are trying to find out and only give you a general, brief idea. Or tell you the wrong thing all together.

QUALITATIVE RESEARCH
Qualitative research is generally done by interviews or focus groups. This is because qualitative data has a lot of information in it and isn't just a number or score. It gives you a much more in depth and informative answer to the question you are asking. However this researching technique can take a lot of time to look over and it is very difficult to generalise hundreds of different answers. It can also be very expensive to carry out.

QUANTITATIVE RESEARCH
Quantitative research is the most time affective and cost affective researching technique. It is usually collected by sending out a vast or small amount of questionnaires with several questions on it. The answers will be in the form of "select a number" or they give you options; strongly agree, agree, neither agree or disagree, disagree or strongly agree. This makes this kind of data really easy to analyse and allows you to give a precise measurement. However because it is a questionnaire it makes it easy for people to lie about the answer, or just guess if they don't understand what they are being asked.

WHAT RESEARCH WILL I USE?
For my research I'm probably going to a big mixture of techniques. At some point I will send out a questionnaire asking about set and what type of video my audience want to see, but up until then and after then I will directly be talking to my audience and trying to gain as much information from them as I can to try and please them. I have also been using secondary research a lot up until now, so will try and use a variety of more researching techniques from now on.