Primary Research

Primary Research is when you gather information that you have discovered without the help of the Wikipedia or other sources of information on the Internet. This means that you yourself do the research instead of going into the library to get the information out of books. This would be Secondary Research.  There are many ways to do Primary Research such as Interviews, Observations, Surveys and Focus groups.

There can be advantages and disadvantages of each method that people use in Primary Research. The bullet points below state both advantages and disadvantages of each one.

Observation has the advantages of being quite a reliable way of researching because you are seeing the evidence for yourself and another advantage is that you take in the information that you need. The disadvantages of Observation is that you could possibly miss something that you don’t see and another disadvantage is that you might not get enough just from observing.

Interviews have the advantage of getting an opinion on a subject that you are researching and another advantage is that you can control the interviewee to give you a certain answer you are looking for. A disadvantage of Interviews is that you can get information that isn’t relevant and that people can dodge the question easily if the interviewer isn’t persistent.

Surveys have the advantages of results turning into a set of statistics and can also tell facts. The disadvantages are that you don’t get reasons why or how and you don’t always get an honest answer.

Questionnaires posses the advantages of displaying set questions and another advantage are that people get a choice from a set answer (yes or no) so that it is closed questions. The Disadvantages of Questionnaires are that people often dismiss questionnaires and don’t like to answer them and another disadvantage is that it can an annoyance to people wanting to get on with their day.

Focus Groups can have the advantages of marking people out of ten and another advantage is that it singles out the few people that are in the group that a product is aimed at OR the product is going to be made for (e.g. Call Of Duty is 16-25 year olds). The disadvantages are that it sometimes displays short and dull questions and another disadvantage is that the Focus Group can be too small (e.g. only five out of twenty people aged 16-25 are interested in Call Of Duty).