The quality and success of a study depend mainly on the type of data you collect. The information can be collected from various resources including surveys, interviews, school records, communities, focus groups, etc. Whether you need data for a study or to improve the marketing techniques, it should be reliable.
The experts use different data collection tools to gather information in forms which are reliable, effective and highly beneficial for achieving the goal. Those data collection tools are listed below. You can choose any of them to gather high-quality information.
Surveys:
When you want to collect data from a large group and you do not have enough time to communicate separately with each individual, this data collection tool can be very beneficial. It will help you in recognizing the characteristics of a huge population.
You can choose certain questions related to a predefined topic and collect people’s opinions. It will be easier to analyze the response without revealing your identity.
Surveys offer a very affordable way of collecting data. You will manage the survey and analyze the collected data. The chances of biasing error will be pretty low and you will be able to achieve much better anonymity. It can prevent you from directly confronting people on some sensitive issues and collecting vital data regarding those issues.
Interviews:
When it comes to collect more accurate and reliable data, the interview is proven a better data collection tool than surveys. Instead of providing candidates with forms filled with questions, you will be asking those questions directly to the candidates.
Accuracy level will improve because every respondent will understand the question effectively and then provide a more accurate answer, through which you can extract more reliable information.
An interview is one of the most widely used data collection tools. It allows the user to collect information from community leaders and other similar people who may refuse to fill a survey form because of business and other issues. If you want to keep the response rate high while collecting data, choose interviews as your data collection tool.
Focus groups:
Focus groups include people with some special characteristics. You can consider it as a great tool for gathering a specific kind of information. Collecting high-quality data from a focus group would be much easier if there are five to six people in a group. It will allow every member to participate in the discussion and provide valuable information that usually people do not share.
You will have to be part of two or three focus groups in order to collect reliable data because people in one focus group can be atypical. The main advantage of the focus group is that you can become a moderator and allow the participants to explain their visions in order to collect better data.
All three listed information gathering tools are beneficial for studies, researches and analyzing a specific organization’s performance in the market. It offers insights on how people react to different things and how that can be useful for your research or marketing tactics. That’s why these tools are widely used nowadays.