There is a lot of information available on Illegal Downloading both on the Internet as well as in the media. It was quite easy to access data and statistics as it is a very relevant topic in our society today. To research this topic I used primary research methods as well as collecting secondary research. The interesting part was that there has been done a whole lot of a research about it because it’s a very relevant issue. Therefore I could compare the various research results with each other and where the same results would come up frequently I could be sure that those results were accurate. Also throughout my research I identified the most important recurring issues on this topic and took these issues to the public in the form of an interview. Taking the sources such as the internet, books etc., and taking that with the interviews, I really think this made it a strong research method. By using research from others and then using your own research do get you a lot of information.
Personally I think that because of the secondary research I found was mostly repetitive, this became difficult to then get a conclusion with enough information with it. I mainly used Google as a search engine, while on Google I used different search terms to find my results. I also looked through books, newspapers, magazines and used podcasts. I feel that using other sources such as books and podcast made my secondary research stronger. I find that the books I looked through didn’t give me as much information as I had hoped for because most of the information was about illegal downloading overall. As my research is on illegal downloading for music, I didn’t feel it was specific enough to help me. I feel that using the internet as a search engine was a good was to research, as the internet has so much information it sometimes can give you information that isn’t reliable. Even though there was a limit to my secondary research, I find that most of the sources were reliable. I used a lot of secondary research in my report, when cross referencing my research my secondary source were very useful and gave me quantitative information.
As I found my secondary research first, it gave me a base for the primary research I then did. As I then was finding information I didn’t find in my secondary research. I think if I had more time I could have spent more time to find information for my secondary research by using the search engine Google more, by going through a number of pages. I would have also read more books and then cross referenced them to more reliable information. Personally I think I have found a decent amount of information on this topic, both being relevant and irrelevant. Although I think I could have done more research offline to get a balance between the offline and online research.
My primary research helped me gain more information on the public’s view of this topic. After doing my primary research I felt that I could have used a wider range of demographics, as I find that I mainly looked at teenagers instead of using a wider social status. By doing focus groups, interviews and surveys I found a lot of the answers to my questions. As the answers were all quite similar because of their age group, I think I could have spend more time asking people of all ages.
By doing a focus group I got more insight in the public’s view. As I didn’t want to become biased to my research I stayed outside of the focus group and became the observer. This gave me a chance to really understand why people download illegally after observing the whole thing I then drew a conclusion from it. I found that staying on the subject was a hard thing for most people. I had to tell people that this was about illegal downloading of music and that they shouldn’t get carried away with the music side of things. This however gave me accurate results and was a strong research method.
Overall I find that my research was quite limited, to improve this I would research a wider audience of different demographics and psychographics. I could do this by using the internet more to reach a larger amount of people.
