Primary data research
Primary data is the information you
gather through specialised surveys or group discussions.
Observation
Personal interview
Qualitative information
Quantitative information
Surveys involving personal
interviews
IMPORTANT:
After you’ve decided which survey
method to use you need to consider the sample of respondents. Your sample can
be a selection of people grouped by a characteristic such as type of school,
area, age, sex or course; or they could be chosen at random to typify the
“unidentified population”.
The next step requires
choosing the number of survey respondents that you need
RULE[1]
The larger your sample size, the more sure you can
be that their answers truly reflect the population. This indicates that for a
given confidence level, the larger your sample size, the smaller your
confidence interval. However, the relationship is not linear (i.e., doubling
the sample size does not halve the confidence interval)
The confidence interval (also
called margin of error) is the plus-or-minus figure usually reported in
newspaper or television opinion poll results.
The confidence level tells you how
sure you can be. It is expressed as a percentage and represents how often the
true percentage of the population who would pick an answer lies within the
confidence interval.