For the duration of this project I have used numerous different research techniques to find out about the impacts and future of blogging. Several techniques I have used have been more useful than others. I found that I got a lot more information using primary research methods such as focus groups and one on one interviews than using secondary research methods such as books and the internet.
To my disadvantage of my primary research was that I could kind of already predict the type of answers I would get back from my focus group and one on one interviews, because the people I was interview were of the same age group as me. Therefore I didn’t really get a good contrast of how blogging impact people. I also feel like I spent a lot of my time on primary research as I had to constantly ask people to do my questionnaire as you don’t want it to be too long but you want it long enough to gain the most information you can. Although saying that the information I got from my one and one interview and focus was reliable but not so much effective as my demographic was the same other than one person, who didn’t really make that much of a difference to my results. Even though I got to chose my participants, I didn’t have a wide range to choose from and again because my primary research was slightly rushed. I couldn’t be too picky on who I had. One setback was that I hoped that I’d get answers with some detail, and even though I asked questions to encourage answers with detail, I didn’t always get that. Maybe if I had asked more people then I would have got more of a contrast. Also in my focus group I was last to ask questions and I felt like my participants may have got a bit bored and found the whole process a little tedious. Another setback was that we was only given about ten minutes each to ask our questions which obviously restricted us from how much detail we could gained out of the answers given. Another method I used was comparative analysis to compare Diggy Simmons blog and Tavi Gevinson’s blogs to see whether if they were easy to use, looked attractive and were entertaining. I wanted to see if those were the reasons why they are popular making people regularly view them.
I didn’t really find my secondary research reliable or really effective. Finding websites on the topic I was researching was quite hard. To be fair I did only use one search engine which was Google which is quite bias. I think I spent too much time sieving through pointless sites etc… and not spending enough time looking for reliable useful sites. Most websites told me about when blogging started and famous bloggers but not how they impacted anybody or us and what they predict the future of blogging will be.
If I had the chance to do this all again I think I would pick a different subject not necessarily for ease but just a subject that’s more accessible on the internet. I felt like I hit a brick wall after a while and lost some motivation. I would have picked a variety of people from ethnicity, age and social class just to get fairer and different results.
