Primary Research Requirments

If your primary research involves human participants you must get approval from university in advance. any research using vulnerable people must be approved by the ethics sub-committee
Research involving human participants must be anonymous and you must obtain informed consent in advance.

Empiricism vs Rationalism:
two main approaches to knowledge
Empiricism:
something that is only true is ti is experienced using senses.
what you do through primary research
Rationalism:
truth can grasped intellectually using logic and reason. 
what you do through reading and discussion

Empirical Research:

• Start with the question 
• Questions that might not have already been answereed
• These questions will contain the clues to the potential methods by which you find the answers 
• I.E are they about peoples feelings, opinions, actives, circumstances, relationships, etc. 

Qualitative/ Quantitative Research:

Empirical research is all about data collection and analysis, however 'data' can take different forms:

• Quantitive data is organised in numerical form
• Qualitative data is found in language- written or oral forms 

Data Collection:

Focus Group:

gathering of deliberately selected people who participate in a planned discussion about a particular topic

Survey: 

Interviews:

– structured/ semi-structured/ unstructured 

Questionnaires:

– should be multiple choice, easy to complete, easy it read and understand without leading the questions 

Ethnography (study of people and culture):
Participant observation/ direct observation
e.g; how many times the female form is used as a sale mechanism on tv after a certain time...

Content analysis (extracting quantitative data from qualitative sources);
measures the frequency of pre-specified items within a particular context

Creative Explorations (Gauntleet, 2007):
using creative techniques as a means of gathering subjective data: lego building, collage, film making, etc. Asked people to take lego and build a scene that represents their identity and then explain there thinking around it. This gives the participant time to think about their response. 

Quantitative data:
To analyse successfully you need a hypothesis (what you expect to be able to prove using this data). The data should prove or disprove your hypothesis
Cross-referencing:
may have basic personal information that you can cross reference with other trends.
Statistically significant:
how you decided is the result is significant. This needs to be asked early on in the process and should have soem logical or rational justification.

Qualitative:
Coding:
making sense of numerous qualitative responses by organising your data into common themes/concepts.

Deductive Analysis (top down)
Using general rule or theory to find specific data in support of the rules
Inductive analysis (down up):
Using the data and your analysis to establish new generalisations about the subject.