Types of Research

Types of Research

Primary Research:

Primary Research is factual information that has been studied by someone. Primary research is new research and it is original. Which means it’s not been copied of anyone or anything as this would be secondary research. It also means that it’s been studied for, as if the person was carrying it out for a specific answer to a question. This could be done in many ways such as surveys, independent interviews, group interviews or questionnaires. These are just the typical way of finding out primary data.

This is an example of a Primary Research. It’s a questionnaire. This would be given out to the member of the public and asked to be filled in because it is someone else filling in the questionnaire that he has made it is primary. Because he made tis questionnaire himself, it is primary and not secondary.

A link to my own questionnaire I created for purposes of this, my questions revolved around fitness. https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/L2VF9Q6

This is my sources for Primary Research:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/schools/gcsebitesize/business/marketing/marketresearchrev3.shtml http://www.uk.ask.com/what-is/what_is_meant_by_primary_research

Secondary Research:

Secondary Research is an interpretation of Primary research. Someone would use primary research to help them write an article using the information they collected from the primary research. Secondary research usually takes two sides of primary research and compares them. It is called secondary research because it isn’t their own research they are using others research to write their own opinion and use the facts they’ve found out.

This is an example of secondary Research. Using other peoples, blogs, newspaper articles, pie or bar charts…  Anything that has been studied by someone else and then you use it to write your own is Secondary research.

This is my sources for Secondary Research:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/schools/gcsebitesize/business/marketing/marketresearchrev3.shtml http://study.com/academy/lesson/primary-secondary-research-definition-differences-methods.html

Quantitative:

Quantitative research is where you do questionnaires or surveys in a structured way to get people’s opinions so you can use them to produce facts and statistics. To get reliable results it’s important to survey a large amount of people and make sure they are your target audience.  Once you have collected the results, they get used in a tale or graph as this is an easy way to represent large amounts of data.

When doing quantitative research it uses both mathematics and statistics. When analyzing the data most likely you will use a program such as Microsoft Excel, this is because you can use formulas at help interpret the data better and is easier to put in a chart or in a graph. An example of this would be “What’s your favourite bar of chocolate?” and it would be a multiple choice question as this is the best structure to use. These would be put into Microsoft Excel and a table would be made then once the table was made, the data would get put into a chart, most common would be bar or pie chart.

This is a chart I made using Microsoft Excel and it shows you different ways to present your data. The question was “what is your favourite chocolate bar?” and below is the table showing the results. The charts around it are the ways of representing the data that has been collected. I believe the pie chart is the best as it gives you a percentage and you can see what the majority of people enjoy most. This in this case is Dairy Milk which is the leading brand.

For this survey I asked to 700 people “what is their favourite chocolate bar?” From my survey I have found out that Dairy Milk is the most liked chocolate bar and Kit Kat is the least liked chocolate bar. I chose to survey 700 people as I thought this would help it be a fair test, as more people will be deciding. I could use the internet to see if my survey results are fair by comparing it to the leading brands of chocolate.

So I used the internet and by the looks of it my survey results are fair as Dairy Milk was the public's most favourite and is the leading brand. Also Galaxy is the public's second most favourite as it also shows in the picture (left) that it’s the second most leading brand. This shows that the survey results I used were correct. This is how quantitative data works, the quantity is what matters as the more people that are surveyed the more likely the results will be fair and conclusive.

This is my sources for quantitative Research:

http://www.marketingdonut.co.uk/marketing/market-research/what-is-quantitative-research-   http://www.simplypsychology.org/qualitative-quantitative.html

Qualitative:

This is used to develop ideas or hypotheses for potential quantitative research. Qualitative research can also be used to gather thoughts and opinions of a small group of people. The most common method for gathering qualitative data is focus groups or interviews.  The reason why they only choose a small group of people is because it’s their own opinion and not everyone has the same opinion as you so if it’s large amounts of people you will be asking you will be getting a lot of different answers. The qualitative data can be used as quantitative data. This is done by the qualitative data being put into a graph and used for studies.

This on the left is a focus group. As you can see there aren’t many people in the group and they are each holding a piece to a jigsaw puzzle. In the center of the table there is a completed jigsaw with one piece missing. They are all holding he right piece but it’s in different colours. This is because they all have an opinion and tats were it links to qualitative research as their opinions can be represented differently.

This is my sources for qualitative Research:

http://www.marketingdonut.co.uk/marketing/market-research/what-is-qualitative-research-

http://www.qrca.org/?page=whatisqualresearch