Research Credibility

There are many factors:

- Range and Variance of participants

- Background of individual eg. social status, marital status, wealth

- Target Audience

- Inducement

- Age of Data

- Researchers personal position and status (professional or academic) resulting in Bias

- Social view on topic.

These influence:

- Relevance

- Quality

- Accuracy

- Completeness.

Case Study Example of Research Credibility

Currently I have been examining my case study, which is looking at customer loyalty, online and in-store shopping using primary research taken from a survey and personal evaluation.

Whilst the survey appears to have sensible measurable questions, I believe the credibility to be weak as it draws all 80 participants from University academic staff or students in the Computing department or on a Computing-related course; so whilst the information from that pool might be correct, it does not accurately reflect a wide variety of people and is focusing on a specific target audience only.

The personal evaluation also draws cause for concern as it is the researchers own personal opinion of how well the site performs; even though they have graded it against criteria, surely what their deems as easy or hard to do on the site is pre-determined by their own experiences with such sites - and considering it is their project they possibly have much more knowledge than an average user.

Application of Case Study Example

The main research contains issues regarding how it is gathered, namely the sources from which it is gathered. From this one might suggest that the researcher needs to widen their participant field in order to obtain more applicable data to the real world and create an accurate measurement. I agree that this would need to be done, but I also believe that as mentioned in a previous blog post on the 16th November, that they need to consider alternative ways to gather the information required. For example, focus groups of various target audiences would provide a broader spectrum to examine, and combined with survey results would provide a much more complete grounding for analysis.

The latter of the above example supports the viewpoint of my colleague made in a previous blog post on the 11th November about research credibility being subjective and how the context of the findings can be twisted to a personal viewpoint – a viewpoint which may have been set before the project was in motion. Taking this a step further, surely all research will have a level of bias towards the researchers individual beliefs and aims; because as I learnt today in a Intermediate Systems Design and Analysis lecture, humans must pass their own judgement to provide context on data. Judgement will never be unbiased.