Knowing Your Audience in Visual Studio .NET

Maker QR Code in Visual Studio .NET Knowing Your Audience

In order to answer a research question satisfactorily, you need to understand the needs of your audience

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The kind of research client you are dealing with has broad implications about how you should deliver the answers to your research questions (I tend to use the terms research client and client very broadly All I really mean is audience) Certainly, research answers are delivered in many contexts For example, if you are handing in a term paper in a graduate course, then the term paper is the answer to research questions and the professor is the research client (you would be smart to figure out the best way to meet the needs of the assignment and ask the right questions before you begin researching and writing the paper) If your manager asks you to research a business idea, then your manager is the research client (and you need to figure out both the right research questions and the deliverables up front) If you can appropriately do so without irking your boss, get the parameters of your research assignment laid out in writing at the very beginning of the project Also, find out who your point person is if things go awry midway through the research process You need to be able to go to a single person for clarification so that you can stay on schedule and deliver the correct product Here are some of the more common kinds of research clients, with an indication of the range of formality you are likely to encounter when presenting answers to these clients: Government agency: Usually requires a formal presentation involving reports and documentation Government agency (risk assessment): Ranges from very informal to elaborate presentations and documentation Academic (high schools, colleges, and graduate): Requires formal documentation such as a term paper or peer-reviewed article Business (competitive and strategic intelligence): Ranges from very informal to highly structured, involving in-person presentations and extensive documentation Business (product management): Informal assessment of course of action, PowerPoint slide presentations

The first and sometimes the hardest task of the researcher is to find the right questions Even if you can find the information you need without using query techniques, if you don t know the question or questions your research is supposed to answer, you won t know whether you have succeeded and you won t have an agreed-upon reference point to objectively determine success or failure when you meet with the research client

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So how do you find out what questions to ask to successfully resolve a research project Well, there s no single answer to this question (ha ha) Experienced professional researchers develop their own, individual methods and techniques for drilling down to the heart of an assignment and coming up with the right list of questions Intuition plays an important role The best researchers have developed a sixth-sense about the questions that should be asked and answered

Journalists are traditionally taught to ask six questions, the so-called six Ws : who, what, when, where, why, and how If you are at a loss about where to begin a research project, start by asking questions Unsure which questions to ask Start with these six; they work well for researchers, too (although they are primarily designed to work for journalists who are writing about stories involving people) If you draw a blank during a research assignment, you can do a great deal worse than falling back on the six Ws Use these questions as filters to probe you research subject, examine it more carefully, and arrive at more detailed questions about it Ask who in the spirit of finding the person who did something If who is a good research question for your project, you should go further and find out about traits, characteristics, history, and so on What is often as simple as the question, What happened But, more expansively, you can ask, What does it mean , What is its purpose , What are its causes , and so on When is often a question of straight chronology But you can also ask when an event will happen again, why it happened when it happened, and so on You might also want to ask in relation to chronology, What new events have happened recently and Why is this important now Where usually describes a place But you can elaborate: Is it part of a larger place What is special about the place This question can help narrow the scope of a research project If you don t know how to answer it, it is probably a good idea to go back to your research client for further where information Why is the question researchers (as opposed to journalists) most often want to know, because if you know why something happened, you know the most important thing about the event Why asks for a reasoning process, and for conclusions (in other words, you may ask why when you re analyzing your primary research, but you re not likely to arrive at a direct causal relationship as the immediate product of primary research) You can elaborate on the why question to ask about proximate causes, underlying causes, motivation, objectives, and alternatives Or you can use it to pose a hypothesis (Sometimes the why is given by your client: Provide evidence that our product is not destroying the ozone layer ) How as a question opens the areas of method, procedure, and process You can use how to find out about goals and objectives, how things work, and whether they are repeatable

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