When gathering secondary research online you must evaluate the source to find out wether it is reliable or not, there are many things you can look at whilst doing this. You must always check the date of an article or post to make sure it is relevant, how many times have you seen someone share a article on Facebook talking about “the most snow we’ve had in years” just to find out the article is years old. You must also look at the domain, domains such as .com and .co.uk can be created by anyone and they can say whatever they want on their domain, government websites (.gov or .gov.uk) and educational websites (.ac.uk or .edu) are much more reliable. You must also check (if you can) the websites author and their purpose for the website, it could be very one sided depending on these two factors.
Primary research if always reliable as you have done it yourself. Original photographs, original documents, questionnaires and target groups are all examples of how primary research can be acquired.
When creating a questionnaire you must ask yourself some questions before making it. What do you want to find out? What is your research question? What kind of data do you need (qualitative or quantitative)? What do you need to ask to get the information you need? What question types will you use? What type of language do you use? How many questions will you ask?
https://www.surveymonkey.co.uk/r/VF5L2LR
This is a link to an online questionnaire I made to find out more about the audience of the series Riverdale, most of the questions are closed except for the last one which is an open question. The multiple choice questions give me quantitative data which allow me to then organise the data into a table or graph. There is also an open question which is purely opinion and collects qualitative data.
Igor Regdos College 