Discuss the advantages and disadvantages of five methods used to gather information and gain insight before beginning research efforts

What will be an ideal response?

Answer: The first method is considering the audience's perspectives. Doing so will allow you to determine what people are thinking, feeling and/or planning. Failure to do so may result in information that is not relevant to the needs of the audience, thereby wasting their time and yours. Various community forums provide current, almost real time information on a variety of topics. Information learned on these sites needs to be carefully considered to make sure it provides valid messages, not paid-for solicitations, and that it is relevant to the topic at hand. It can also be very time consuming to examine several sights. The third method of gathering information is by talking with supervisors, colleagues or customers. These groups may have insight as to the information you need, or where to find the information. Additionally, they might have insights about your audience that you may not find elsewhere. Fourth, reading reports and other company documents can be a great source of background information. A knowledge management system collects the experiences and insights of employees throughout the organization. However, information in these reports is only accurate up until the data was collected, not released, so information might be out of date or inaccurate. The last source of information is the audience you are writing the communication for. Asking thoughtful questions that allow you to best meet their needs saves both you and the audience time and will help to produce better work. However, on occasion, the audience may not have a clear understanding of what they really want from the information, so this could be a starting place, with the potential for other research tools to be used.