Research Methods

Primary Research:

It's known as 'first hand research,' where the information has not been taken off from any other data, it's usually field work, where you would go out and find the research yourself. Its carried out by using surveys and questionnaires. I have decided to use this type of research because I think that this is the best way of gathering data as you are able to personalise the questions to suite your own interests and desires. Also you can go out into the 'field' and speak to people yourself and gain their reactions to your magazine. 
However by doing this it takes a long time to produce a list of questions, and you have to go out and find your target audience, which could be difficult considering that they might not all be in the same place at the same time.

Secondary Research:

It is produced by taking others research and data that has already been carried out previously. For example taking data from the internet or newspaper reports. This way of creating research is fast and easy but the reason why I have not chosen this research method is because sometimes the research is not always accurate and therefore it may be misleading and have you submit false data.

Quantitate Research:

Is used to survey vast amounts of numbers and has numerical data and statistics to uncover peoples opinions and attitudes towards the given work. It generalises the data and unpicks different patterns and results. There are different types of methods including, online surveys, polls and telephone interviews. The advantages to this type of research is that it is fast and you are able to gather a lot of information. On the other hand some of the methods may not interest the audience for example, people might 'hang up' on the telephone interview, or during the online surveys they could not be telling you the whole truth. This is why I am not using this research method as I want accurate results for my music magazine in order to appeal to my target audience.

Qualitative Research:

This type of research is merely the opposite of quantitative research. It is more dependant on peoples real thoughts and opinions then on numbers. Data is collected through focus groups or face to face interviews, so that the company can have a good and truthful results to essentially move on forward with. I prefer this method over quantitative research as by having face to face interviews the audience must be honest and you know for definite that each piece of data is real and reliable. But the problems with the type of research is that the interviewee may feel uncomfortable or even intimidated and feel forced to give an answer. Also like primary research it takes longer to produce large statistics, so you may not have a lot of data to 'go on' for your magazine.