Test1

Research

What is research?

Research is defined as the creation of new knowledge and/or the use of existing knowledge in a new and creative way so as to generate new concepts, methodologies and understandings. This could include synthesis and analysis of previous research to the extent that it leads to new and creative outcomes.

Types of research

Fundamental or basic research

Basic research is an investigation on basic principles and reasons for occurrence of a particular event or process or phenomenon. It is also called theoretical research. Study or investigation of some natural phenomenon or relating to pure science are termed as basic research. Basic researches sometimes may not lead to immediate use or application. It is not concerned with solving any practical problems of immediate interest. But it is original or basic in character. It provides a systematic and deep insight into a problem and facilitates extraction of scientific and logical explanation and conclusion on it. It helps build new frontiers of knowledge. The outcomes of basic research form the basis for many applied research.

Basic research

Seeks generalization
Aims at basic processes
Attempts to explain why things happen
Tries to get all the facts
Reports in technical language of the topic

Applied research:

In an applied research one solves certain problems employing well known and accepted theories and principles. Most of the experimental research, case studies and inter-disciplinary research are essentially applied research. Applied research is helpful for basic research. A research, the outcome of which has immediate application is also termed as applied research. Such a research is of practical use to current activity.

Applied research

Studies individual or specific cases without the objective to generalize
Aims at any variable which makes the desired difference
Tries to say how things can be changed
Tries to correct the facts which are problematic
Reports in common language

Basic and applied research, further divided into three types of research bearing some characteristics feature as follows:

Quantitative research

It is numerical, non-descriptive, applies statistics or mathematics and uses numbers.
It is an iterative process whereby evidence is evaluated.
The results are often presented in tables and graphs.
It is conclusive.
It investigates the what, where and when of decision making.

Qualitative research

It is non-numerical, descriptive, applies reasoning and uses words.
Its aim is to get the meaning, feeling and describe the situation.
Qualitative data cannot be graphed.
It is exploratory.
It investigates the why and how of decision making.

Exploratory Research

Exploratory research might involve a literature search or conducting focus group interviews. The exploration of new phenomena in this way may help the researcher’s need for better understanding, may test the feasibility of a more extensive study, or determine the best methods to be used in a subsequent study. For these reasons, exploratory research is broad in focus and rarely provides definite answers to specific research issues.

The objective of exploratory research is to identify key issues and key variables.

Descriptive research

The descriptive research is directed toward studying “what” and how many off this “what”. Thus, it is directed toward answering questions such as, “What is this?”.

Explanatory research

Its primary goal is to understand or to explain relationships.
It uses correlations to study relationships between dimensions or characteristics off individuals, groups, situations, or events.
Explanatory research explains (How the parts of a phenomenon are related to each other).
Explanatory research asks the “Why” question.

First Person research

First person action research refers to an approach to research undertaken by researchers as an inquiry into their own actions, giving conscious attention to their intentions, strategies and behaviour and the effects of their action on themselves and their situation.

Observation research

Observation research is a qualitative research technique where researchers observe participants' ongoing behavior in a natural situation. ... The purpose of this type of research is to gather more reliable insights. In other words, researchers can capture data on what participants do as opposed to what they say they do.

Survey Design

To keep your survey on the right track, here’s some top tips and tricks:

Define a clear, attainable goal for your survey.

What does a clear, attainable goal look like? Let’s use an example. Say you want to understand why customers are leaving your business at a high clip. Instead of a goal like: “I want to better understand customer satisfaction.” Your goal should be something like: “I want to understand the key factors that are leading our customers to leave—whether these reasons are caused by internal or external forces.”

Once you’ve come up with your goal, you can use it as a reference to prioritise the top questions you want to ask.

Keep the more personal questions to the end.

Treat your survey like a conversation. Would you start any exchange by asking someone how old they are? Probably not. Instead, you’d engage in small talk first, and gradually move on to more personal topics. Similarly, keep your early set of questions light and straightforward, and then slowly move towards more personal questions (often taking the form of demographic questions).

Don’t let your survey get too long.

In most cases, your respondents are doing you a favor by taking your survey. What better way to respect their time than by not taking up too much of it? You’ll be rewarded with a higher completion rate as well as more thoughtful responses for the questions you end up including.

Focus on using closed-ended questions.

What do we mean by closed-ended questions? We’re talking about questions that use pre-populated answer choices for the respondent to choose from - like multiple choice or checkbox questions. These questions are easier for respondents to answer and provide you with quantitative data to use in your analysis.

When choosing tick-boxes or radio button type questions, remember to clearly distinguish between multiple answers being accepted and only one answer exclusively being allowed as the answer.

Open-ended questions (also known as free response questions) ask the respondent for feedback in their own words (qualitative data). Since open-ended questions can take much longer to answer, try to only include 1-2 of them at the end of your survey.

Don’t ask leading questions.

In other words, try not to put your own opinion into the question prompt. Doing so can influence the responses in a way that doesn’t reflect respondents’ true experiences.

For example, instead of asking: “How helpful or unhelpful were our friendly customer service representatives?” Ask: “How helpful or unhelpful were our customer service representatives?”

Keep your answer choices balanced.

Using answer choices that lean a certain way can result in respondents providing inauthentic feedback.

Let’s revisit our prompt: “How helpful or unhelpful were our customer service representatives?”

Here’s how a set of unbalanced answer choices (that lean towards being too positive) can look for that question:

a. Very helpful

b. Helpful

c. Neither helpful nor unhelpful

And here’s how they’d look once balanced:

a. Very helpful

b. Helpful

c. Neither helpful nor unhelpful

d. Unhelpful

e. Very unhelpful

This kind of question is often listed as a "Likert Scale" where you have a range of responses on a sliding scale.

Absolutes can absolutely hurt the quality of your responses.

Absolutes use words like “every,” “always,” “all,” in the question prompt. And, essentially, they make the respondent either agree or disagree with a strongly worded question without allowing for more nuanced opinions.

For instance, take the question:

“Do you always eat breakfast?”

a. Yes

b. No

Your respondents might eat breakfast most of the time, half of the time, or on occasion, but you wouldn’t know the difference once the responses come back. Consider what are appropriate options for this question.

Stay away from asking double-barrelled questions.

Double-barrelled questions are when you ask for feedback on two separate things within a single question.

Here’s an example:

“How would you rate the quality of our product and support?”

How would the respondent answer this question? Would they address the quality of the product? The quality of support? Maybe they’d skip the question or (worse) leave your survey altogether.

You can fix a double-barrelled question by either choosing one thing to ask or by breaking the question up into 2 separate ones.

Preview your survey before you send it.

Imagine sending your survey only to realise that you forgot to add a question. Or that you didn’t include a few essential answer choices for one of the questions you asked. In either case, you’ll probably end up being frustrated and get results that fall short of what you need.

To prevent any mishaps in your survey design, preview your survey. Even better, share it with others so they can catch any mistakes you might not find on your own.

There are a number of issues with the following survey- can you spot them all?

Page updated

Google Sites

Report abuse