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CRITICAL READING #3: Research Methodologies

CRITICAL READING #3: Research Methodologies

The research methodologies I've read are all familiar to me based on my previous educational and professional backgrounds when I was back in the Philippines. I took up Marketing Management back in college and we had a course about market research and that's the first time I've encountered these methodologies. After getting my bachelor's degree, I worked as a Brand Manager for 4 years at one of the leading food and beverage manufacturing companies in the country. Being in that field, I've conducted and been a part of a lot of research studies for various products -- new and existing products.

Looking back, what I remember was that the hardest part of conducting a research study was formulating your research question. That was the part of the project that took a lot of time; a lot of back and forth as having the right research question will more or less dictate the outcome of your project. Once you're confident that you have the right research question, finding what methodologies to use is pretty easy. Back in college, we mostly used survey questionnaires and interviews as it also entails a lot of work and understanding in forming out the questions for both methods. Just as what the readings we had this week, I was reminded on how important it is that we know how to properly form the questions as participants may have a different understanding of it depending on how it is written. It brought me back to the countless hours and days my groupmates and I spent in editing our survey and interview questions so we can get useful answers/ data out of it.

I also had the chance to participate in a lot of FGD's when I was working as a Brand manager as it was seen as an effective method in getting feedback from a particular target market and there views on the topic. But then again, reading through the topic of FGD made me remember how easily FGD's can turn into a show and tell session with no direct relation to the topic being discussed as you have a lot of people in one room and sometimes it's hard to control the responses and interactions of the participants. This is why I always made sure that we pick an effective facilitator who can well handle situations like this. Our FGD participants would also get monetary allowance and so we have our research department to conduct screenings prior to choosing which ones to best represent the target market we're looking for.

In conclusion, I'd say that conducting these research methodologies is pretty easy once you have the right questions and tools. The hardest part is arriving at the right research topic/ question and formulating the survey and interview questionnaire. I guess my concern/ question is I'm not sure how my mentees would be able to carry out these methodologies when they don't have formal training on conducting research. I can see that they're excited to do and work on the research project but we just have a lot of questions and uncertainties on the processes and requirements on how to do the methodologies.

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