Research Diary 1

Research is an important process for understanding and describing of the public. We can get and gather the facts and opinions about a problem, situation and opportunity through research. The qualitative and quantitative research are the two common categories of the research techniques that always have been distinguished.

For qualitative research, it usually valid, but not reliable. It always uses an open-ended question such as what is your favorite book and which countries would you most like to visit? Therefore, it is a free response format. The answers of the respondents can be totally different. Use qualitative research can get the concerns and opinions from people. Therefore, it is subjective and in-depth.

For quantitative research, it usually valid and reliable. It always uses closed-ended questions. The answers of the question always are such following items, “Yes”, “No”, “False” and “True”. It always relies and focus on the statistics and numerical measures. Since the result of quantitative research can reflect the number and percentage of the choice and the selection of people, use quantitative research can obtain information from a large number of people. Therefore, it is objective.

In my research, I temporarily feel interested and would like to investigate the relationship between social media and people, and how the social media affect people. In my research, I will use both qualitative and quantitative research. Use the qualitative research, I will select the target audiences who use the social media to be the interviewees and then to have a depth interview with them. I will know their feelings, views and opinions deeply. Therefore, I will get comprehensive information.

Since I will also need some numerical data in my research, such as the spending hours for social media of people each day and which social media that people always use, qualitative methods rarely projectable to larger people. In addition, since the qualitative research is unstructured and there may have too many different answers that after collecting, the data may be confused and cannot have good concentration but poorly focus. Therefore, I think the quantitative methods would also be used for my research as it allow generalizing to a larger population and quantitative research is highly structured.

Since qualitative and quantitative research have their own strengths and weaknesses, use both two research methodologies can help to get a better research result, get richer and deeper information and findings. Therefore, I will use quantitative and qualitative research for my research.

Student Name: Chong Wing Ching, Uni