Primary Research

Primary Research is when you collect the new information and data by yourself. When you collected data first through a new study,and before you collected, it doesn't exist. It is the process of gathering new information that helps reveal the answers to your questions. Primary research is so we can find out what our intended target audience wants and we can give it to them.

To conduct this research, you can complete questionnaires, interviews and focus groups.

Questionnaires are a set of printed or written questions with a choice of answers, it is for a survey or statistical study. It includes open and closed questions. Open questions often result in qualitative information. Closed questions usually provide quantitative data that you can easily analyse and represent in graphs, charts and diagrams. Advantages of questionnaires are that they are very cost effective and are less intrusive. On the other hand this could be a disadvantage because people might not respond or ignore them. Another disadvantage is that they are impersonal, this means that it may be difficult to understand answers. An example of when you would use a questionnaire is when you are starting a new radio station and you want to find out what would be good to include for your listeners. For example you could ask what type of music do you listen to?
Below its the questionnaire that I created for the college students.
College radio survey

Interviews are a conversation between two people (the interviewer and the interviewee) where questions are asked by the interviewer to obtain information from the interviewee. The main questions used are open because they allow discussion to take places and keep conversations flowing. The advantages of using interviews are that they are far more personal and you know that interviewer is interested because they are taking time to set it up. However interviews are very time consuming and they use a lot of resources. An example is when you have finished watching a film in the cinema and then someone asks you questions about the film that you have just watched and gets your opinions.

Focus Group is a form of qualitative research in which a group of people are asked about their perceptions, opinions, beliefs, and attitudes towards a product, service, concept, advertisement, idea, or packaging. Advantages of using this focus groups are more accurate information is recorded and you choose people that you want but on the other hand it may not truly represent the whole population as it is a small number of people which isn't enough to reflect the target audience. An example for a focus group could be about TV programme, you could have a group of people similar to your target audience and ask questions about what could  be changed and what they enjoyed the most.