The Importance of Research in the 21st Century

By: Racheal Kiiza

Knowledge is power in the 21st century, the world is moving to a place where it is a mandate to know how to read and write, be computer literate, know how to use social media among other things.

Research plays a key role in the world today and many firms, organisations; hospitals invest a lot in research.  For a law to be passed in any country it is mandatory to carry out research on that particular law and this is aimed at getting as much information on the law at hand as possible.

In Kyusa the participants were privileged to acquire research skills. Not everyone can do research; many universities teach research methods but students know it theoretically but cannot carry it out practically.

To research is to purposely and methodologically search for new knowledge and practical solutions in the form of answers to questions formulated beforehand.  Research methods are ways through which information is attained and the most common are literature searches, talking with people, focus groups, personal interviews, telephone, mail, email and internet surveys respectively.

Under research methods, there is data collection, data analysis, types of research and participants were adequately taught on each one of these. As research is carried out its findings must be documented either through writing, diagrams, and graphs. The style and tone of writing must be evident as the research is presented since tone conveys feelings of the writer on a particular subject.

CNN and other media networks  strive to provide  credible and valid information and they usually report live in whichever  country a breaking story is being covered. As research is carried out, it is important for the information sources to be credible and must not be based on hearsay. How to determine authenticity of a source, a source can be a book, internet source, et cetera, there are three things that can be used to determine how credible and valid an information source is and these are authority, currency and purpose. Authority is in terms of who published the source? Is the source current or outdated? What was the intention of the author?

Every source of information will encounter factual material and a test of whether something is a fact, it must answer one of the following questions; who? What? When? Where? If it does, it is likely a fact. When you assess a source’s credibility, you try to determine how believable it is. There are two sources of information; primary and secondary sources. Primary sources are collections of raw data requiring interpretation and they contain factual material like personal narratives, government documents. Secondary sources contain interpretations of raw data like scholarly books, journal articles.

Research is vital and when acquired as a skill, it becomes an indispensable asset.