Understanding research
Consumers spend a lot of time reading other people’s research rather than conducting their own. Producers of research, investigative or explore an area that has relevance to them, interpret their data and then communicate their findings.
Theories are usually general statements that describe something, provide an explanation of why something happens, and can be applied to predict what will happen in the future.
Types of research
Investigating or researching topics of interest may be undertaken using quantitative and qualitative research methods.
Advantages and disadvantages of these methods:
Data vs Information
Data is raw information while information is usually sorted. Data can tell you very few things without analysing them and analysed data is information. In other words, data is a collection of facts while information puts those facts into context.
Primary and secondary information
Primary information are sources and data that are exact and experienced firsthand (like in history class). If you collect the data, then you it is primary data.
Secondary information is the opposite, they’re references and include information of other things. Secondary information are more up-to date and can provide more unusual and important insights into issues, especially at a local level.
Some data collection methods
- Surveys
- Focus groups
- Interviews
- Observation groups
Open and closed questions
Open-ended questions do not limit the answers a respondent can give while closed questions are easier to develop and answer.
How do you feel about the spread of gaming? (open) Is the spread of gaming good or bad? (closed)
| Quantitative | Qualitative |
|---|---|
| Provides validity of a larger sample space as quantitative can gather more data in a much shorter amount of time. Participants are more likely to participate in a quantitative investigation as it’s anonymous, ease of access. | Qualitative data provides context and in-depth analysis of the participants while quantitative does not. Qualitative data does not provide validity as the sample space is much smaller than quantitative data. |
To fact check, make you sure you have information correctly done:
- Name of the interviewee
- Date of the interview
- Place of the interview
- Qualification to be an interviewee
- Organization to which the interviewee belong
- Contact information
- How the interview was conducted
- Name and contact details of the interviewer
These are referencing and important in case anything happens.
Referencing
Citations in a document help readers to find the source of the information and also assist the students in avoiding plagiarism. You can use footnotes to reference.
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet1
citation website.
However, we usually use APA, an in-text citation rather than footnote.
IT is a subject (lastname of Author, year)
In order to reference in a bibliography, start with the author’s name, year, then website name, then website link.
Yang.C, (2023), How to learn it, website link