Primary research meaning:

Primary research is the research that you gather yourself, whether it be through surveys, questionnaires etc. The research is primarily unique to your topic and helps you to find stats and figures that are tailored to your individual product. For me, I will find primary research important to my topic especially when it comes to finding out how piers etc. find speaking out to each other, through questionnaires, which will help me gauge the importance of my words through those answers.

Secondary research:

Secondary research is completely the opposite to the likes of primary research, as it is through research which already exists, whether it be through websites, or TV and Radio shows/ documentaries. This research may be something you gather, to back up ideas or to provide pre-existing products which are like what you are trying to make. For example, for my product I may use NHS stats or forums from government websites to find out the male suicide rates or waiting list lengths for therapy etc. sometimes, secondary research can be vital for a product as it provides that already existing support which may be more reliable than your own. However, a downside to secondary research, is that some sites of shows, may say the complete opposite to others.

Quantitative and qualitative data:

Quantitative data is data that is driven and based on numbers and percentages, which mainly focuses on the questions of ‘How much?’ or ‘How many?’. The data itself may be used to compare and contrast between multiple sets of data.  This data may be used to show a concrete and evident difference between figures and tropics. Whereas, qualitative data is more of the word based data, which is designed to ask questions such as ‘what?’ or ‘why?’ which leads you on to dive deeper into the question to discover more about the topic.  Qualitative data may be harder to gather as people may steer away from filling out questionnaires as it takes longer than Quantitative forms to fill out.