6.2 What Is Research?

Research is a method that writers and speakers use to gain knowledge about a topic. (Moxley, 2022).

There are two types of research: primary and secondary. Primary research is any research that you conduct yourself such as surveys, interviews, observations, and ethnographies. Secondary research is research that has already been compiled and formatted by someone else.

Primary Research

Surveys

Surveys are collections of facts, figures, or opinions gathered from participants and used to indicate how everyone within a target group may respond. For example, if you were running for public office, you might want to campaign on issues that are important to your potential constituents. To learn more about their concerns, you could create a survey and distribute it to all voters in the area and use the feedback to determine the focus of your campaign. Or if you were a member of student government and wanted to give the university some feedback about the problems that students face when trying to park on campus, you might conduct a survey of the student body to generate detailed information about the type and severity of these problems.

But before you create a survey, you should ask yourself four basic questions (Wrench et al., 2008). First, “Do you know what you want to ask?” Surveys, by their very nature, are concrete—once you’ve handed it to one person, you need to hand out the same form to every person to be able to compare results. If you’re not sure what questions need to be asked, then a survey is not appropriate. Second, “Do you really need to collect data?” Often you can find information in textbooks, scholarly articles, magazines, and other places. If the information already exists, then why are you duplicating the information? Third, “Do your participants know the information you want to find out?” One of the biggest mistakes novice survey researchers make is to ask questions that their participants can’t or won’t answer. Asking a young child for her or his parents’ gross income doesn’t make sense, but then neither does asking an adult how many times they’ve been to see a physician in the past ten years. Fourth, “Will your participants tell you?” If the information could be potentially damaging, people are more likely to either lie on a survey or leave the question blank.

If you decide a survey is the best way to gather this information, you will have to determine how you will conduct that survey. The most expensive method of conducting a survey is to send it through the mail (even if you don’t include a postage-paid envelope to make it easier for recipients to return their responses). Putting your survey online using platforms such as SurveyMonkey is more affordable. However, both methods of surveying have the same drawback—getting people to actually fill out the survey. Conducting your survey face-to-face generally results in a higher number of completed surveys, although this method is more time consuming than surveying via the mail or online.

Finally, if you are attempting to gather data about a large group of people, you might wish to sample just a small percentage of them in order to save time. For example, maybe you want to find out how people in your community feel about a new swimming pool. The whole community may contain one thousand families, but it would be impractical to try to survey all those families, so you decide to survey two hundred families instead. In this case, you will also have to determine whether or not your sample is representative of the whole. The number may be large enough (as opposed to surveying, say, twenty families), but if the two hundred families you survey only represent the rich part of town, then your sample (the two hundred families) is not generalizable to the entire population (one thousand families).

Interviews

An interview is a conversation where the interviewer asks a series of questions to one or more respondents to learn facts, figures, or opinions. As with a survey, an interviewer generally has a list of prepared questions to ask. However, unlike a survey, an interview allows for follow-up questions that can aid in understanding why a respondent gave a certain answer. Sometimes interviews are conducted on a one-on-one basis, but other times interviews are conducted with a larger group, which is commonly referred to as a focus group.

One-on-one interviews enable an interviewer to receive information about a given topic with little or no interference from others. Focus groups are good for eliciting information, but they are also good for seeing how groups of people interact and perceive topics. Often information that is elicited in a one-on-one interview is different from the information gained from a group of people interacting.

If you’re preparing for a speech on implementing project management skills for student organizations, you may want to interview a handful of student organization leaders for their input. You may also want to get a group of students who have led successful projects for their student organizations and see what they did right. You could also get a group of students who have had bad project outcomes and try to understand what went wrong. Ultimately, you could use all this information not only to help you understand student organizations’ project management needs, but to provide support for the recommendations you make during your speech.

Secondary Research

Secondary research is reported by someone not involved in conducting the actual research. Most of what we consider “research” falls into the category of secondary research. If you’ve ever written a paper for one of your classes and had to cite sources, then you’ve conducted secondary research. Or if you read an academic article about an experiment that a group of researchers conducted and then tell your audience about that study, you are delivering information secondhand to your audience. You as the speaker did not conduct the study, so you are reporting what someone else has written.

Ethical Use of Secondary Sources

One place where secondary research can get people into trouble is when they attempt to use someone else’s secondary research. For example, in a book titled Unleashing the Power of PR: A Contrarian’s Guide to Marketing and Communication, Mark Weiner cites research conducted by the investment firm Veronis Suhler Stevenson Partners (Weiner, 2006). If you read Weiner’s book and wanted to make a claim based on Veronis Suhler Stevenson Partners’ research, you might be tempted to just leave out Weiner’s book and instead cite the Veronis Suhler Stevenson Partners’ research instead. While this may be easier, it’s not exactly ethical. Mark Weiner spent time conducting research and locating primary research; when you steal one of his sources, it’s like you’re stealing part of the work he’s done. Your secondary research should still be your research, and if you haven’t laid eyes on the original study, then you shouldn’t give your audience the impression that you have. An exception to this rule is if you are citing a translation of something originally written in a foreign language—and in that case, you still need to mention that you’re using a translation and not the original.

Also, be aware that published sources sometimes make mistakes when citing information, so you could mischaracterize Veronis Suhler Stevenson Partners’ research because you are depending on Weiner’s interpretation of it. Think of it like the old game of “Telephone,” in which you tell one person a phrase, that person turns to the next person and repeats the phrase, and by the time thirty people have completed the process, the final phrase doesn’t remotely resemble the original. When people pass information along without verifying it themselves, there is always an increased likelihood of error.