There are two different types of data, Primary and Secondary data. Primary data is data that is collected first hand, by yourself or your team. This type of data can be collected via interviews, questionnaires or observation in order to answer your research question. Similarly, secondary data is used to answer your research question, except the data is already there for you. Thus you do not need to conduct any form of interview or observation. However, you do need to use this data to support as well as argue against it, in order to form …show more content…
Participant observation features the researcher overtly monitoring the participants and getting involved in the research task. Whereas nonparticipant observation is covertly monitoring the participants without them knowing they 're being observed. An example would be the way a scout looks and analyses a players performance without the playing knowing the scout is looking at them. Whereas for the participant observation, the player would know the scout is there and looking at them. This can be a disadvantage to the research as this could cause the participant to act differently, which could in turn ruin the results and make the observation unreliable. Therefore, http://www.pearsonschoolsandfecolleges.co.uk/feandvocational/sportsstudies/btec/bteclevel3nationalsportandexercisesciences/samples/studentbook/sampleunit4researchmethodsforsportandexercisesciences-bteclevel3nationalsportexercisesciencesstudentbook.pdf, (2014) , suggests that the researcher should be careful in approaching the participants. Although field notes and checklists are the best ways of recording observation data, during an observation it can be hard to write field notes, therefore creating a checklist before can help, although this may not be very in depth. An advantage of using an observation is that you can identify certain behaviours that you may not be able to see during an interview or …show more content…
In quantitative data, questionnaires offer a simple and fast way to collect data from a large amount of people at one time. There are two types of questionnaires, open and closed, both are useful as they can be used to generalise to the whole population. As well as this, questionnaires use random sampling as various people respond to them. However due to questionnaires being from a random sample, there is a probability for little responses and people may respond in a way that can help the study as you cannot develop the question further to get more data. Although questionnaires can be easily found in newspapers, they can sometimes be too hard for people to understand and thus the structure of a questionnaire needs be good, in order to be easily understood. This is called a questionnaire design. The better the structure and look of the questionnaire, the higher the rate of the questionnaire being returned. A questionnaire needs to be short, appealing with colours, bold and very concise.
When using an open questionnaire, it is always a must, for your questions to be structured well as an open questionnaire encourages people to respond with an in depth answer.By adding words such as how and why at the end of the question. For example, What problems may people face because of the heathrow expansion and how will this affect you?
On the other hand,