Research Methods.

Primary and Secondary research.

Primary research - straight from the source.
Examples; news reporters, surveys and questionnaires, one on one interviews (get more specific answers and more personal information), focus groups (specifically chosen (target audience) groups to voice opinions on a certain products), observation, empirical (research you can observe, example, someones behaviour), contact (get in touch with (example) the author of a book, director of a film etc, to talk to them), chat rooms/forums.
Secondary research - passed on information from another source.
Examples; Books, Internet, newspaper specialised articles (media guardian, telegraph technology section), radio 4 (the media show), podcasts.

Both primary and secondary research would both be used to ensure that information is correct and reliable.


Quantitative research

Research using numbers.
As a short task, we looked through magazines to see if they were representing ethnic minorities fairly. We counted the number of white models and article features and the number of coloured. White had a much higher count throughout the magazine appearing 10 times the amount compared to coloured. We also found that the majority of articles used a white model, this meant that a lot of the bigger images throughout the magazine were white and therefore white seemed to dominate. The magazine we used was 6years out of date which would have had an effect on our results so to improve our research i would have used up to date magazine and researched over a range of magazines with different target audiences.
This technique is very general, i think if more detail was wanted on the subject then more research would have to be completed such as why coloureds appear less frequently than whites.
However this technique is good for providing quick statistics.