evaliuation

Evaluation of Research

I found out quite a bit from my research. My secondary research was quite hampered, as the books that were available to me were not up to date enough, in the constantly changing gaming industry. My primary research was also drawn back due to the fact that I had only a very small number of people to both do a focus group for and for a questionnaire. However there were several things that have been found out such as the average age of a gamer is between 25 and 35 though there is a large growth amongst children and young adults. Also we could have found out that almost every person in my survey and focus group think that they play video games just enough or not enough, not many find that they think it is detrimental to their health.
Most of the secondary research books and many websites were not very helpful as they were not up to date or were old news articles about video games. Also the school computers blocked a large number of the websites that would have been useful to me but were instead categorised as games. This led me to spending a lot of time out side of lessons searching for the necessary and relevant websites. My secondary research was very methodical, I typed various different key words into several different search engines and I then searched the first 3-4 pages as the school blocked most Internet sites.
As anyone can write anything they want on the Internet I had to spend a lot of time corroborating various different articles by using the links they put up to the articles they got the information from. The secondary research was done first and it was better this way, it enabled us to ask our primary questions with the knowledge we had gained from the secondary research. There was also a large amount of reading that had to be done with all the secondary research sources that were available to me. However the time spent on the secondary research was too long and more time should have been allocated to primary research as it takes more time to gather the necessary information. There were to many Internet sources in my report, however it is the only research type available that is modern enough keep up with the constantly changing gaming industry.
The primary research was not very reliable as there were not enough people in the survey or the focus group. For my survey I needed Xbox players so I had to use friends from my Xbox live account to fill out the questionnaires, again for my survey group I needed Xbox live players and had to select 4 people in my class who played Xbox live regularly instead of a mix of ages. The questions however for the questionnaire were mainly closed and for the focus group and interview they were mainly open questions as I could get a lot more information from the other forms of primary research. If this were to be done professionally then there would need to be a much larger questionnaire group of perhaps several hundreds and the questions would have to be more detailed and in-depth. For the survey group again more people would be needed perhaps 20 or several sets of 20 from a broader age range who all play Xbox or who are given an Xbox for a certain period of time, also taking into account the new kinetic board.
However the answers given in the focus group were quite good but the method for recording them very poor, as I had to write it all as they were saying it. The answers were thorough and useful however again not enough people were asked to make it evidence of anything though the survey and the focus group did have very similar results. The focus group in my opinion did not last long enough and we did not get enough time or preparation for the task. The questionnaire was set out in a easy to read manner though it lacked choice in several places, however for the most part they were not required from the answers I was given. The questionnaire was sent out over the internet to 10 different friend’s email accounts on my Xbox live where they then completed them and sent the emails back to me. This way was fast and efficient for gaining the results in a fast manner. This method has only recently started to be used in the industry for fast and quite reliable method of gathering information. The demographics of my various different interviewees, focus group and survey were all noted and asked in the survey and interview while the focus group was easier as everyone in my class is roughly the same age and gender is also easy to note.