Research Methods

Qualitative: Involves opinions and values (words) Favoured by Interpretivists

Quantitative: Numerical data. Favoured by Positivists

Primary data: Collecting new data that hasn't been collected before and the researchers purpose e.g. survey's

Secondary data: Collected old data that has been available before and has been collected by someone else. i.e. official staistics

• Practical issues: access to subjects, time, money, personal risk
• Ethical issues: informed consent, confidentiality, causing harm, illegal activities
• Reliability: can the research be repeated in the same way?
• Validity: are we getting a true picture of real life?
• Examples: Link methods to studies which have used it
• Representative: does it reflect the whole population? Can we generalise from the study?
• Theory: Positivism VS Interpretivism
• Explain: say how the method works, what different types of it are there
• Data: what kind of data does the method give us (Quantitaive vs Qualitative)

• Research methods: experiment, questionaire, interview, observation, official stats, documents
• Positvism (advocated by Durkheim) look for correlations, objective facts
• Interpretive: interpret meaning of words, use qualitative data to do this

• Selecting respondents to carry out research:
• Unit: individual of a population/ frame: lost of all people in a population
• Random: everyone has an equal chance of being selected. Large sample needed. Most representative
• Stratified: population divided based on variables such as sex. Need sampling frame. Small sample
• ***********: members put researcher in touch wit possible respondents. Not representative. Good from groups that are hard to identify
• Opportunity: people put themselves forward and those who are easily accessible. Can't generalize. Easy, cheap and quick

• Face2Face: high response rate, opertionalize concepts- interviewer bias, time consuming
• Telephone: cheap, easy, low response rates
• Postal: cheap, easy- response rates low and generalize
• Internet: cheap, quick- response rate low, limited those with internet access
• Fixedq: respondents restricted to limited answers. Quantative data, reliable. Hard to operationalize concepts, can't get qualitative data
• Openq: respondents allowed to provide their own response. Detailed data, operationalize concepts. Time consuming, interviewer bias
• Overal: people may act and respond differently to different types

• Structured: pre-set questions, easy to replicate and compare, less chance of interview bias. Lack of detail, hard to find out more
• Semi-structured: some fixed questions. Researchers influence the route of interview. Reliability
• Unstructured: few or no fixed questions. Researcher directs the interview, hard to replicate, time consuming, may go off track
• Individual: less time consuming, can't observe interaction
• Group: closer to real life, may sway opinion