Research Report

For this unit i am writing a report to explain the purposes and methods of research. I will be talking about the advantages and disadvantages to the different types of research while also talking about my own personal experiences using these types of research.

There are 2 main types of research primary and secondary research. Primary research is where you use questionnaires, interviews and surveys to get information from members of the public in the hope of getting information to either support a claim your trying to make or to find out a target audience. Secondary research takes other peoples information whether its from books or even wikipedia and uses it to get data and figures to go towards your information.

During my time on this course i have created my own primary research this has been through creating  surveys that people can answer so that i can use the information towards a report. I feel that primary research can be extremely helpful because if you are trying to create a product or find out more about the product one of the most important things to find out is what your target audience will be. Questionnaires/surveys are arguably the best way to do this because you are getting actual answers from the people themselves. I have found this really handy when finding out information for my course project. There are disadvantages for example sometimes the person answering the survey may not be interested in the topic your trying to cover meaning you don't gather much information. One other drawback could be people not giving complete answers meaning you don't get all the information you need for your work.

This is a screenshot of my video game questionnaire i also did a survey for Levis both questionnaires have helped greatly with finding out what my final project will be and what will be my target audience. In my last course me and a group of other students did a focus group to get meeting notes towards our own ideas for a mobile phone app this allowed us to keep our meetings saved away and used as a tool so that we could go back to and get information from for our paper work. The only drawback to this is that there is a lot of pressure so sometimes when speaking you could mess up the information meaning that you will have to start again. Another problem is the recording equipment can be complicated to use.

In terms of secondary research i have used a variety of websites to get information related to the work i must complete. Secondary research is a big positive in that there is a massive amount of information you can get from secondary research such as history and viewing figures. For my Levis assignment i have done secondary research to find out about the 501 campaign i went on the main site to get history and sales figures. The site i went on is official so all information is true and updated. A drawback is that other sites information can be out of date or even not true so the best advice is to find official reliable sites.