Collection of information in sociology and journalism

To invent or calculate, without having specific information, is impossible. Neither the economist who calculates the consumer basket, nor the journalist who is preparing the sensation, nor the poet writing about love. People can not create and count from scratch.

The collection of information is a person's activity aimed at finding the necessary information.

Collect information that can be 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, you need information of a certain order, which can be found in different sources. Therefore, the methods of collecting social information are divided into the following:

• Sample. Applicable in the case where it is impossible or not necessary for a full study. Allows a small amount of material to draw conclusions about the population as a whole.
• Analysis of documents. Such collection of information helps to identify the dynamics, growth trends, changes in a particular process, society, phenomenon.
• Observation. It implies a purposeful, Systematic recording of social facts that are 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.
• Interview. Allows to reveal the views, attitudes, ideas, the value system of a certain group of people. It can be conducted in the form of interviews or questionnaires. In the first case, the interviewer works with one person, asking him pre-prepared questions. In the second, the work is carried out with several people at the same time: they answer the questions of a pre-prepared questionnaire offering answers.
• Archival research. Such a collection of information in the comments does not need.
• Experiment. In sociology, only limited groups of people can be studied in the laboratory. Placed in unusual conditions, the subjects may behave differently than they really are. Nevertheless, the experiment makes it possible to study the changes in various components to the overall result.

Methods of gathering 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 accumulating data will be a compilation of 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. A journalist can do the following:

• Communicative data collection (it 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 the journalist chooses, he must remember: the result will necessarily be affected by the purpose of data collection, skill, experience.