To invent or count without specificinformation is impossible. Neither the economist who counts the consumer basket, nor the journalist preparing the sensation, nor the poet writing about love. People can not create and count from scratch.
Information gathering is a human activity aimed at finding the necessary information.
You can collect information compromising, statistical, marketing, technical, etc.
For each industry, the collection of information will haveits features. For example, in order to develop social protection programs, information of a certain order is needed, which can be found in various sources. Therefore, the methods of collecting social information are divided into the following:
- Sample. It is used in the case when it is impossible or not necessary to complete the study. Allows a small amount of materials to draw conclusions about the totality as a whole.
- Analysis of documents. This collection of information helps to identify the dynamics, growth trends, changes in a particular process, society, or phenomenon.
- Observation Implies purposeful,
systematic recording of social facts,which is supposed to be checked. This collection of information has the advantage: the behavior and actions of people can be judged directly at the time of their commission, and not indirectly, as it happens in the process of sampling or analyzing documents. - Poll.Allows you to identify the views, attitudes, ideas, value system of a certain group of people. It can be conducted in the form of an interview or questioning. In the first case, the interviewer works with one person, asking him questions prepared in advance. In the second, work is carried out with several people at the same time: they answer questions from a pre-prepared questionnaire offering answers.
- Archival research. This collection of information in the comments does not need.
- Experiment.In sociology, only limited groups of people can be studied under laboratory conditions. Placed in unusual conditions, experimental subjects may behave differently than in reality. Nevertheless, the experiment allows to study the changes in the various components on the overall result.
Methods of collecting information in journalism differfrom sociological. First of all, the journalist must determine the purpose of his research. It should be borne in mind that in journalism the process of accumulating data will be a compilation of the methods of study, the personality of the journalist, his experience, professional ethics and universal morality. Collecting information in journalism, unlike social methods, is always a creative process. Journalist can do:
- Communicative data collection (this includes interviews, interviews, surveys).
- Non-communicative: (observation (hidden or explicit), work with sources, documents, etc.).
- Analytical (system or comparative analysis, modeling, inductive or deductive method).
Whichever method a journalist chooses, he should remember: the result will necessarily be affected by the purpose of data collection, skill, experience.