Primary research is the collection of fresh, first-hand data, it maybe be on a topic or a subject already researched but may look at it from a new perspective (George 2023a). An example of primary research is the performance evaluation survey on my game I produced for my Level 2 qualification.

advantages

• The research that you conduct is reliant on your own abilities, the quality of your research is dependent on your skills as researcher.
• As you are the one responsible for the research, you can do your upmost to keep it unbiased.
• As the owner of the research you have control over who reads and who can use it so you can be aware of where you research goes (George 2023a).

disadvantages

• Primary research done properly and effectively can be time consuming and and can require substantial funding.
• It needs to be backed up by another study, peer review or secondary research to create research with high validity (George 2023a).

Secondary research is data that has been collected by someone else. It is research that has been conducted on established research (George 2023b). An example for secondary research is a Wikipedia table on the game sales of the Fire Emblem series.

advantages

• The gathering of data is generally faster as it may only require a few searches to find the data you are looking for.
• The validity of the source that you are using can be more easily assessed than hearsay.
• In most cases, it is free to access and use other people’s research as long appropriate credit is given (George 2023b).

disadvantages

• In the case of Wikipedia, a readily available source of information, the information there is often not backed up with references such as a peer reviewed paper.
• It is heavily reliant on the validity of the primary research being unbiased, if the original study or any other data sourced is biased in anyway it will corrupt the finding of the secondary research. The research therefore becomes fruit of poisonous tree (George 2023b).  

Qualitative research is research that conveyed in words, used to gather the complex thoughts of people or a singular person allowing for a deeper understanding of an individual (Streefkerk 2023). An example would be a journal article from the International Review of Financial Analysis called The effects of negative reputational contagion on international airlines: The case of the Boeing 737-MAX disasters (Collings et al. 2022)

advantages

• Qualitative research can be extremely malleable so that during the research process it can be adapted to the way the questioning leads.
• If being used to test a product the insights gained through qualitative research can be used to improve a product further.
• A questionnaire using qualitative questions can help the researchers revel new aspects that would not be revealed if the questions were not open ended (Bhandari 2020a).

disadvantages

• The same factors that make it a useful research method can make the research conducted unreliable. For example, if a questionnaire is changed after half the answers are taken then you have to either eliminate half the answers or have unreliable data.
• If a large quantity of data gathered the information can be overwhelming to manage. This leads the generalisation of the data which can introduce bias based on the translation method (Bhandari 2020a).

Quantitative research is communicated in a mathematical format. Researchers use it to test hypotheses or gain knowledge on generalised facts (Streefkerk 2023). An example could be the same Fire Emblem sales table as all the data gathered for it was numerical.  

advantages

• The data drawn from quantitative research can be replicated and reformatted easily due to numerical content.
• Data gathered can be on varying scales, smaller scale where ten to twenty people are asked or a larger scale where hundreds or thousands of people are asked.
• It can be used to test a hypothesis as you can ask a question based on other research that has been carried out (Bhandari 2020b).

disadvantages

• The questions of a quantitative survey need have simple responses, such as yes or no, to provide the data in a translatable format. This means the data may only provide superficial responses.
• With only simple answers available detail cannot be captured. This missed insights into other factors can lead to biases (Bhandari 2020b).

Mixed methods research is the combination of quantitative and qualitative research. It allows a clearer conclusion than quantitative or qualitative alone can gain (George 2023c). An example of this is again the performance evaluation survey on my game I produced for my Level 2 qualification as I asked both questions with a qualitative answer and quantitative answers.

advantages

• The key advantage of mixed method research is that it has best of both quantitative and qualitative research allowing for complex data without the short-sightedness of numerical data.
• Depending the format and structure requirements a survey the researcher can have a lot of flexibility in the method of their research (George 2021).

disadvantages

• Due to combining both quantitative and qualitative research this considerably increases the workload of the researcher or team.
• The mixing of quantitative and qualitative research can lead to data from one type contradicting the other and generating inconclusive results (George 2021).