Strayer Week 8 Strengths & Weaknesses in Data Collection Brandon Newell Discussion

Respond to one of your colleagues’ posts:

• Who made similar choices to compare and contrast? Explain the similarities or differences in your experience.
• Explain the clarity of the connection between your colleague’sresearch question and choice of data collection methods. Is thereanother method that could be considered? Be sure to provide yourrationale.
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Strengths and Weaknesses in Data Collection

Iemployed a qualitative interviewing for data collection. I also learnedabout focus groups. The advantage of interviewing as a data collectionmethod is that it allows for clarification of answers from therespondent (Guest et al., 2017). Besides, the technique has a highresponse rate, and the questions can be tailored to specificrespondents. However, the focus groups may allow for generating newideas since the interview occurs in groups (Guest et al., 2017). Also,using focus groups saves time since several people are interviewed atonce and sharing info allows for direct synthesis.

Nevertheless,interviewing is expensive since it requires the interviewee to travelto the location of the respondents (Guest et al., 2017). Moreover, themethod is time-consuming since one participant is interviewed at a time.Similarly, the use of focus groups is slow. Additionally, the techniquelacks privacy and confidentiality for the respondents (Guest et al.,2017).

Experience from the Methods

Byusing interviewing and focus groups in data collection, I establishedthat they are suitable for collecting qualitative data (Oltmann, 2016).The approach allows additional questions to the interviewees as well aspersuading the respondents to answer the questions. However, I found itdifficult to interview a large number of respondents using thequalitative interview. Besides, it was not easy to control therespondents in the focus groups since some members dominated the answers(Oltmann, 2016). Thus, it was possible to record biased answers.

Choice of Data Collection Method

Asa researcher, the choice of data collection will depend on the type ofresearch. Therefore, I would choose qualitative interviews or focusgroups when conducting qualitative interviews. This approach will helpin collecting a wide range of data from the respondents. Also,qualitative research will contain open-ended questions to help therespondents in answering exhaustively (Barrett & Twycross, 2018)

References

Barrett, D., & Twycross, A. (2018). Data collection in qualitative research.

Guest,G., Namey, E., Taylor, J., Eley, N., & McKenna, K. (2017).Comparing focus groups and individual interviews: findings from arandomized study. International Journal of Social Research Methodology, 20(6), 693-708.

Oltmann, S. (2016, May). Qualitative interviews: A methodological discussion of the interviewer and respondent contexts. In Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung/Forum: Qualitative Social Research (Vol. 17, No. 2).