Gauge the Importance of your Study

So you have finally made up your mind. You have the greatest idea of all time. You have a topic for your research. You then became excited and started the research. You finished gathering data and analyzing it. You then presented it to another person. You are ecstatic. But you are broken into pieces when the person asked “So what?”

This is perhaps the question every researcher must have in mind. So what if you find out that women live longer than men? So what if you know what blogging platforms people use? So what if you discover that having your own domain is better than just a subdomain? It all boils down to that question – so what?
This is where significance comes in. The significance of the study is usually a short paragraph that declares the purpose of the study. You can easily come up with the significance using the following steps:

1. Reread your research problem and objectives. Then ask yourself, for what are you doing all this?
2. Get out of the box and think of society in general. Think about who will be influenced by your study.
3. Formulate the significance by having the study or the target audience (the people you will help with your study) as a subject.

Simple right? That’s all there is to it. At first glance, the significance may seem like a very small part of your study. But without it, your study will have no meaning at all. After all, It is the significance that tells people what your study is for.

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Researcher's Etiquette

The growth of new information is unstoppable. This phenomenon is mainly because of researches that have been created almost every year. With each year come a lot of issues in the academic community. Replicated researches, misquoted replies from respondents and careless research have been common.

With this in mind, I figured the importance of etiquette in the process of conducting research. Here are some basic rules that can be taken into consideration.

Don’t copy other people’s work

This rule is easier said than done. Sometimes, some researchers tend to copy others unintentionally. The best way to solve this problem is to always do a background study before you research. It is always good to know the existing information first, rather than conducting research now and finding out that it’s replicated content later.

Replicated content had always been a source of tension on the internet. Copying other people’s work (most commonly known as plagiarism) is a venue for being sued. It is a violation of Intellectual Property Rights. To avoid this, you can follow two simple rules: (1) Put quotation marks around the words you have taken from another source and indicate the source (author or website) in a parenthesis or (2) paraphrase the idea of the author but still indicate his name or website in a parenthesis.

Don’t copy other people’s ideas

Another bad news is that ideas can also be copied. So it does not reside merely on the text or work. The bad thing is that sometimes a researcher fails to notice it. Copying ideas is prevalent especially when researchers are making claims. Sometimes, they think that certain ideas are common knowledge when in reality, it is an idea of another person

Let your subject know what your research is about

Transparency is very important when it comes to approaching your subjects. You should be open to them. You can do this by telling them about your topic, the methods you are going to implement and how you will interpret the results.

Be honest in delivering results

This is the most important rule. Never ever alter the data especially if it does not coincide with your hypothesis. A lot of researchers have fallen into this trap. They undergo selective data collection where they only get the data that reflect their hypothesis. Data can be interpreted but must be reflected as is.

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Formulating your Objectives

The second thing you need to know when conducting research is how to formulate objectives. Objectives are basically your goals in your research. There are some things that must be considered to be able to craft effective research objectives.

Objectives are basically your goals in your research.

First, you have to know that there are two kinds of objectives: general objectives and specific objectives. These objectives are obviously different when it comes to scope and goals.

The general objective encompass what you need to achieve on the study overall. This directly reflects your research problem. Review your research problem and think about how you can answer it. The answer you’re looking for is the objective you must pursue.

You can see this better in an example. Let’s imagine you are researching about the experiences of bloggers in their everyday lives. So you have the problem: What is the daily experience of an average blogger? You can then transform this into an objective. I will do this by making a statement: To find out the daily routine of bloggers. So there, we have a general objective.

As for specific objectives, these will comprise the little things you need to do to achieve the general objective. Imagine your general objective being broken down into parts and you can come up with specific objectives easily. As for our example, we can come up with the following specific objectives:

* To discover the number of hours a blogger writes a post
* To explore the blogging-related activities of bloggers
* To determine the consistency of bloggers in their everyday activities
* To compare the activity of bloggers

Not that hard right? Be sure to give some time but don’t spend the whole day thinking about it. After all, they are pretty easy to make, well, once you get used to it.

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What Do I Have to Do to get on Technorati Top 100?

You are probably laughing at me now. A complete beginner in the blogosphere is asking how to get to Technorati's Top 100. Very amusing.

But before you laugh your sides off. Let me tell you that I do not need your answers. I'm going to find out the answer for myself. That is why this September, my first ever monthly study for Web Researchoo will be no other than "The Secrets of Technorati Top 100".

Are you going to teach us blackhat methods?

Of course not! What I'm going to show you are cold, hard facts on what the Top 100 are currently doing that you may have forgotten.

Yeah right! Like a newbie can do that.

Yes. Any ordinary researcher can do that. It takes some time and effort. But anyone can do it. I'm going to prove to you that blog research is something more and should not be belittled. It can move blogs to greater heights if utilized properly.

How are you going to do that?

I will conduct content analyses on the Top 100 websites on Technorati. This a usual qualitative method that lists and tallies repetitive elements in a particular medium. There is usually four facets to this method namely visual mode, content mode, personality mode and audio mode. However, since blogs are the media. I'm not going to include the audio mode.

Can I see the results?

Of course! But you have to wait. Research, after all, cannot be rushed. I will be making several small articles regarding the research when it's done. So watch out for it.

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