- Techniques of data collection depend on various factors like whether the data required is quantitative or qualitative.
- The data could be primary data or secondary data.
- Various techniques of data collection for questionnaire, sampling, field study, survey, case study, etc
CASE STUDY
- It is a detailed account of a single social phenomenon.
- Offers a holistic view on the subject.
- Particular situations and incidents like riots and conflicts are more appropriate for this method as they require an in-depth study.
- The case study method is a very popular form of qualitative analysis.
- Pauline V. Young describes case study as “a comprehensive study of a social unit be that unit a person, a group, a social institution, a district or a community.”
- Case study method results in fruitful hypotheses along with the data which may be helpful in testing them, and thus it enables the generalised knowledge to get richer and richer.
- The limitation of this method :
Read Bain does not consider the case data as significant scientific data since they do not provide knowledge of the “impersonal, universal, non-ethical, non-practical, repetitive aspects of phenomena.” Real information is often not collected because the subjectivity of the researcher does enter in the collection of information in a case study. - Also there is danger of false generalisation.
FOCUS GROUP TECHNIQUE
- Mainly used for non-positivist research.
- This is basically bringing together a group of people to have an extensive and free flowing discussion relating to the focus issue.
- The moderator in the discussion keeps it on the desired focus.
- The usual procedure is to tape record the conversation and analyse them later.
- Usually, there is no structure or discussion pattern.
- Observation bias is significant in Focus group exercise as compared to Participant Observation.
CONTENT ANALYSIS
- The research method is often used in interpretative sociological research.
- It is a methodology for studying the content of communication.
- Earl R Babbie define it as “the study of recorded human communication such as books websites paintings and law.”
- The term Content Analysis is generally applied to the analysis of written communication or visual material rather than interview data.
- This technique produces quantitative data which can be processed by the computer and analysed statistically as well.
- It is criticized for involving subjective judgements which may create data that are quantifiable but not valid.
