Q Topic 1: Working with Primary Research Data or Tools Each Senior Capstone Project is supposed to reflect some kind of original or primary research by students -- for example: • a small poll or a survey to test or replicate the findings of a research study related to your research report; • a needs assessment questionnaire for a business proposal; • interviews for the media kit; or • an audience demographics analysis for a speech. For this discussion, I want you to tell your classmates what kind of primary research you're conducting or the data you are using from someone else's original research to support and complement your survey, poll, interviews. Post a draft of either an interview questionnaire or survey or poll tool (consisting of purpose statement and list of questions) that you plan to use, OR a summary of the raw data that you have gathered, or a summary of the data that have gathered from someone else's relevant primary research from a credible and authoritative source like a peer-reviewed research journal. In your post, tell us how this information will be used in your project; that is, how does it fit into the scope of the project? As you begin your response, remember to orient your readers to the general goal of your project. Remember, too, that primary research is an original investigation -- a way of gathering data from raw material sources (such as people or original experimentation). Secondary research is comprised of the materials that others have written (about their primary research). To understand the significance of the difference, please watch: So, for example, if you were to actually test fish for mercury content in a business report on how to ameliorate mercury contamination in water, that would be primary research. Even if you interview the scientist who tested the fish for mercury content, that interview data would constitute primary research. But if you read the scientist’s published study on the mercury in fish, that would be secondary research. For more on the differences between these two forms of research, I recommend this chart. It is important for writers and researchers to know how to gather information from different types of sources and how to use that information in their work. You might also review the material provided under Content > Course Resources > Senior Capstone Project Toolkit > Additional Resources on how to design a survey and how to read a research study. Interviews and surveys have much in common, in that you are gathering specific information from the original source to use for specified purposes. Your tools for both forms of data collection are similar: They each consist of a purpose statement and a list of questions. For the interview, your questions may be broad and open-ended. For the survey tool (questionnaire), you are likely to have more close-ended questions so that you will be able to gather the information more consistently. This is a good resource for designing survey tools, as is this. For help avoiding plagiarism when you summarize someone else's research study, see this handout or this PowerPoint under Content > Course Resources > Writing Resources in our classroom. Please post your initial response to this discussion prompt by 11:59 p.m. Eastern Time on Wednesday, changing the title of your post to include your name and your project's proposed topic. Then, respond to the initial posts of at least two other students by 11:59 p.m. Eastern Time on Saturday. Continue your conversations through the end of the course week.