Hypothesising the effect of the Internet on research - Essay Example

Hypothesizing the effect of the Internet on research In 1990’s, there is question who is using internet and for what purpose. To answer this questionone has conduct paper surveys, telephone surveys to calculate the people on the internet. Later implementing the www forms gave the possibility to have direct information available at eh mouser click on the statistics of people. Internet is useful in research particularly in social research areas where information regarding people as individuals and groups, interaction with people is required.

Research involving people is a difficult process because the subjects are not constant in their thoughts, approaches, behaviors, and are makes the results variable from time to time. Also there is impact on research from the researcher perspective as he/she is also a person with variability. So, the researcher has to focus on the evidence of live experience which involves the surveillance and collection of data from surroundings. The collection of data includes the interviews of persons, Focus on groups, photographs and records, where internet stands the primary source for such critical information with speed and ease of use.

Primary research involves the gathering information from the world; and secondary research requires reading the books, journals, papers and articles that can be find in the library or on the Internet. Internet is acting like a medium for the data collection. Knowledge base is a fully hyperlinked text which can be used as a sourcebook for the experienced researcher to browse. In order to provide the evidence to the research hypothesis, qualitative research uses literature reviews. A proper support and broad array of literature avoids the related aspects of own, favoritism and assumptions, expectations and bias in study.

Internet offers such scope to collect the large literature from the www. Levinson (1990) believe that asynchronous electronic communications capability is to provide opportunity for reflection and editing of messages before sending them adds to the production of a closer fit between ideas, intentions and their expression in writing. Responding at their convenience instead of waiting for turn-taking, as required in face-to-face interactions, potentially provides more equality of participation to more reserved participants (Hiltz and Wellman, 1997).

While analyzing the case studies as part of qualitative method, internet gives the information in the form of interviews, blogs, forums where valuable information is hidden directly expressed by the persons or representatives from the case. These documentary materials on internet will be used as first and foremost source of information without using participant observation. Most of the business research needs up-to-date information on the current trends of their products in scope and the target people.

Journals, articles, online news headlines, besides being the repositories of such information, are also reliable in terms of accuracy with their quick and daily updates. A common problem for qualitative researchers is the availability of lot of information before the researcher before identifying the scope to the study. The researcher has to read the report and synthesizes it, which involves a lot of paper work in normal terms. But the advanced context based search functionalities and the filter tools available on the web sites give the direction, less effort and time saving options to the research.

With the help of internet knowledge, qualitative research can attain much validity, reliability with proper measures and ethics.  The data collected from Internet, being already in the digital and electronic format, facilitates the transfer and sharing the research data with the other groups of researchers in different parts of the world. The information can access much more quickly and efficiently to be processed for research analysis. References:1. Colleen M. Kehoe, James E. Pitkow, Surveying the Territory: GVUs Five WWW User Surveys, Accessed on 28 Aug 2007, available from 2.

Michael D. Myers, Qualitative Research in Information Systems, Accessed on 28 Aug 2007, available from 3. Patsy Clarke, The Internet as a medium for qualitative research Accessed on 28 Aug 2007, available from