It is impossible to invent or count without specific information. Neither an economist calculating a consumer basket, nor a journalist preparing a sensation, nor a poet writing about love. People cannot create and count from scratch.
Information gathering is a person’s activity aimed at finding the necessary information.
You can collect compromising, statistical, marketing, technical, etc. information.
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, methods for collecting social information are divided into the following:
- Sample. It is used when it is impossible or not necessary to complete a study. Allows you to draw conclusions about the totality as a whole on a small amount of materials.
- Analysis of documents. This collection of information helps to identify the dynamics, growth trends, changes in a process, society, phenomenon.
- Observation. Implies purposeful,systematic recording of social facts that are supposed to be verified. This collection of information has an advantage: the behavior and actions of people can be judged directly at the time of their commission, and not mediated, as happens in the process of selecting or analyzing documents.
- Poll. Allows you to identify the views, relationships, ideas, value system of a certain group of people. It may be 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 answer options.
- Archival research. This collection of information does not need comments.
- Experiment. In sociology, only limited groups of people can be studied in laboratory conditions. Placed in unusual conditions, experimental subjects may not behave as they do in reality. Nevertheless, the experiment allows us to study the changes in various components on the overall result.
Methods of collecting information in journalism are different from 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 data accumulation will be a compilation of study methods, the personality of the journalist, his experience, professional ethics and universal morality. Gathering information in journalism, in contrast to social methods, is always a creative process. Journalist can do:
- Communicative data collection (this includes interviews, interviews, polls).
- Non-communicative: (observation (hidden or explicit), work with sources, documents, etc.).
- Analytical (systemic or comparative analysis, modeling, inductive or deductive method).
Whatever method the journalist chooses, he must remember: the goal of data collection, ability, experience will certainly affect the result.