Primary Research is basically 'new research, research you have done yourself. It normally consists of direct forms of getting the desired information. There are many ways to generate this information for example you could do surveys, questionnaires and interviews. You can do these methods in small groups (focus groups) or a one on one basis. As the researchers are working closely to the people being questioned, it helps them get a more reliable result and also makes the person feel safe and secure.
As I said before primary research is research that is done by you and is taken straight from a source (the public). For example if a developer wanted to research what genre of games are doing well recently they would conduct a focus group of sorts and get answers using a questionnaire to gather the public's thoughts.
A questionnaire will be used to send out to the public and get feedback on the subject at hand. There is one problem however because a questionnaire is sent to people via the mail, this could mean the person receiving it may not answer or send it back. If you wanted to stop this from happening you could create a Focus Group and give them out in there and all of them will get answered. If the person who is filling out the questionnaire is being truthful and honest then this gives the researcher valid information that they can use to create better games for the community.
With a survey, it is a little different. A survey could be distributed to many people with ease which means you can get more people to fill them out and get a broader range of answers that makes your information more accurate and true. You could place a survey onto a website where people could just go onto it and fill it out within a few seconds or another place you could have it is at the end of beta for a game. You could have a survey pop up and allow the person to give there honest thoughts and feelings on the game they just played. This is probably the better one of the two as you will get greater truthful answers and it leads to the creation of a better game.
Secondary Research
Secondary research is when your information is gathered from other people research like documents. For example if you got your information from a wiki then that is considered secondary information. This is because the research/information on a wiki page was not conducted by you but by someone else. If you are to use this information then be careful, as the information there could be wrong/bias.
One great example of secondary research within gaming is webpages like blogs and other such sites. They are secondary resources because all the research was done by someone else so you are seeing it from someone's perspective. These website could exaggerate the information to allow for better reading/more exciting reading. However, doing this detracts from the validity and accuracy of this information give people the wrong results.
There are many upsides to using secondary research but the main one I think is that the work is already done for you so it is less time consuming. This gives you more time to work on the project the research is for. To eliminate the information being wrong you could look over a few versions of the topic you are looking for to see if there is a constant theme throughout.
A disadvantage is that the information has been written by another person so they could have made parts up/gotten the wrong information which affects the validity which leads to the research spending time on false statements. The information could also be bias to the person who has written it. For example, if you read a article about football teams it is more likely the team the person supports will be praised more and the team which he doesn't will have more negative things to say.
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Quantitative Research
Quantitative research is when the people ask give their thoughts and opinions on the subject at hands however making sure it isn't bias. To gather a good variety and suitable results you need to do this is a large group of people to make sure you get greater accuracy in your results.
Quantitative Research have many methods of gathering the required information. For example, a structured questionnaire, this is a yes or no form of questionnaire, Online surveys and surveys on paper. You would use these methods when you create a focus group. Lets say you gather teenagers to answers some questions about a certain topic they will answer these and be truthful as they have come to the group and will overall give you more reliable results.
One advantage to this type of research is you will get a better idea of what the public think about your topic because they are giving you their opinions about it. This improves the accuracy of your information.
A disadvantage to this type of research is that the opinions you gather could be bias to the person because people have certain opinions on the things they hate and love so this could lead to loss of accuracy in your information.
Qualitative research is a method of research that aims to find the public's behaviours and habits. For example focus groups, this is where the researcher will gather a bunch of people to ask them questions about the topic that the researcher is interested in knowing.
An advantage to using this method is that when you are ask questions to the focus group the people will feel safe and secure which could lead to them answering truthfully and confidently as it will be anonymous. This means your information will be more accurate and honest.
A disadvantage to this method is that if you use surveys as your form of gathering information then it is likely that when you send these out you may not get them back as people tend not to fill them in, the just throw them away. This means you waste your time creating and distributing for there being a chance you not getting them back.
