Information gathering in sociology and journalism

2024 Author: Henry Conors | [email protected]. Last modified: 2024-02-12 02:40

It is impossible to invent or calculate without specific information. Not an economist calculating a consumer basket, not a journalist preparing a sensation, not a poet writing about love. People cannot create and count from scratch.

Collecting information 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 have its own characteristics. For example, in order to develop social protection programs, information of a certain order is needed, which can be found in various sources. Therefore, social information collection methods are divided into the following:

• Sampling. It is used in the case when it is impossible or not necessary to complete the study. Allows on a small amount of materials to draw conclusions about the population as a whole.
• Document analysis. Such a collection of information helps to identify the dynamics, growth trends, changes in a particular process, society, phenomenon.
• Observation. Implies purposeful,



systematic recording of the social facts that are supposed to be tested. This collection of information has the advantage that the behavior and actions of people can be judged directly at the moment they are committed, and not indirectly, as is the case 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 questionnaire. In the first case, the interviewer works with one person, asking him pre-prepared questions. In the second, work is carried out with several people at the same time: they answer questions from a pre-prepared questionnaire that offers answers.
• Archival research. This collection of information needs no comment.
• Experiment. In sociology, only limited groups of people can be studied in the laboratory. Placed in unfamiliar conditions, test subjects may behave differently than in reality. However, the experiment allows you to study the changes in the various components of the overall result.

Methods of collecting information in journalism differ from sociological ones. First of all, the journalist must determine the purpose of his research. It should be borne in mind that in journalism the process of data accumulation will be a compilation of research methods, the personality of a journalist, his experience, professional ethics and universal morality. Gathering information in journalism, unlike social methods, is always a creative process. The journalist canget busy:

• Communicative data collection (this includes interviews, interviews, surveys).
• Non-communicative: (observation (hidden or explicit), working with sources, documents, etc.).



• Analytical (systematic or comparative analysis, modeling, inductive or deductive method).

Whatever method a journalist chooses, he must remember: the result will necessarily be affected by the purpose of data collection, skill, experience.