Research Methods

There are two kinds of research, Primary and Secondary. Primary: Comes straight from the source, e.g. if you find a Blackberry. Survey, Interviews (Market Research), focus groups (groups of people discussing a product), observation/empirical (first hand to see whats happening), forums to find out what consaumers really think of a product. Secondary: Comes from someone else, e.g. you wrote about the person finding the Blackberry. Books, internet, Media Gaurdian & Telegrapgh Technology Section, film or documentaries, Radio 4 Media Show (podcast)

You would use both forms of research for reliabilty and if you see the same information you would think that it would most likely be true.
Are magazines representing ethnic minorities failry?

'Instyle' magazine 2009

Black:15
Latino:9
Asian:2
White:272

What type of research was used? Primary research was used, empirical research.
What were your findings? A very high majority were white, which could be because of the target audience and class, but overall there was not a fair mix of ethnicity totalling 26.
How could you have improved your research? Looking at other magazines from different years to see how it has changed.
What was good and bad about the research technique you used? Our empirical primary research was good because we counted for ourselves, to see how many ethnicities there was. It was bad because we found difficult to distinguish between races, being that some of the white people were extremely tanned. Also we should have maybe made more catergories as some people had more than one etchnic background.