Primary research is information conducted first hand by the person looking for some specific information. But it is not always the person him/herself who conducts, there are different ways to do this. Some of the ways are focus groups, face to face, over the telephone, questionares and surveys and these do have a few advantages and disadvantage.
Focus groups focus on target audience to get different opinions and their thoughts on whatever the Primary research is being held about. A few advantages of a focus group are the fact they use a target audience, this confirms they are interviewing the right people. Another advantage is that in the end there are different opinions so results can be averaged out to see what is more important to the audience and what isn't too much. The disadvantages of a focus are that the group might have shy people, so they don't feel confident enough to speak out and tell their actual thoughts about the topic. Another disadvantage is that a focus group is not everyone, it is only a group of people and if a company is giving a demo to a focus group about their new product, the opinions the company gets are only from people they interviewed and that focus group is not the only people who might buy the product.
Face to face can be done by either the person him/herself or someone from a company/group. Face to face is where a person goes out and talks to people in person and asks them questions. This way is also used when taking surveys and questionnaires. A few advantages of face to face are that people can analyze the other person's thoughts while he/she answers it by looking at their body language, so it is easy to spot if the person is shy or confident or whether at some point they didnt feel comfortabel about a question. Also face to face confirms that you are actually talking to the right person and not someone fake e.g no one can be trusted on the internet and sometimes people lie about their age, face to face confirms that you are talking to the right person. The disadvantage of face to face is that, compared to talking to someone over the telephone or online which can be done from anywhere, face to face requires meeting up somewhere at a specific time.
Usually it is businesses and busy people who overtake primary research by calling people but this can be done by anyone from anywhere. The advantages of this are that telephone calls can be made from anywhere e.g it easy to call someone from london to france and compared to face to face this is alot flexible for everyone. It also saves travelling costs for example alot of businesses and companies that are global and have branches/offices around the world use services like skype and msn which saves them having to go to a different country or city. The disadvantage of this is that like face to face this requires two people to be ready at a specific given time, so person one needs to be ready for the call at a specific time of the day from person 2.
Questionnaires and surveys are similar in a few ways, e.g they both require filling whether it is a handwritten type it online. here is an example of an online survey i uploaded for my friends to take
Class TV Survey. Both tend to relate to other people as much as they can so people can answer the questions using their own knowledge of the topic. The difference between a questionnaire and survey is that questionnaires mostly ask for specific data i.e ''when was the last time...'' but surveys are a bit more opiniative e.g ''what do you think of...'' The advantage of a questionare is that in the end it gives data that is very relevant and precise to what you wanted, for example a questionnare might ask ''when was the last time you went to Mcdonalds'' and 100 people will give an estimated day of the week which is very relevant to what the company wants to know. The advantage of a survey is that you get different opinions of people which can then be averaged out at the end to see what people have in common. The disadvantes of both questionnares and surveys are similar because the disadvantage of a questionare is that it is not very opinionative so the person taking it can only give a specific answer and the disadvantage of a survey is the opposite, the person taking the survey will give their opinion so when it is evaluated, it is hard to tell if the answer is really what it should be.
The advantages of primary research itself are its correct informtaion, in the end you get exactly what you were looking for and it is upto date.
By conducting the surveys, questionares,interviews or phone calls first hand means that the person doing it can be sure that the information they are gathering is correct. Also what ever way we use to get the informtaion we want, it is upto us what questions we ask people so when we get the answer it is what we wanted. When compared to secondary research this advantage is very benficial because when we search for secondary research we dont always get exactly what we want and we get different answers in different mass, for example we can design a questionare and design the questionare so they questions are eiher opened or closed however when looking at secondary research that work/study was donr by someone else and their questions will be different to what you want.
Primary research is upto date.
The disadvantages of primary research are it can be expensive and its time consuming.
Doing primary research in most cases needs equiptment and to buy the equipment we need money. So in this case secondary research is better.
Primary research is done first hand by people so time consumed when someone either make a phone call, ask people to do surveys or takes face to face interviews.
