4.1: Why It Matters- Research

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Why learn traditional and online research methods?

Business communication, done well, requires thoughtful planning and carefully crafted media. Research is a key component of building good communication, and research, while perhaps hard to wrap one’s mind around, is like any other project.

Whether you present your communications over email, in a nice glossy, or even a video presentation, you will likely have to research topics in order to support your ideas. Doing research is important for good business communication.

In this module, we will discuss all manner of conducting research. Our guiding principles are from social science inquiry, which uses a fairly specific and largely agreed upon format.

As you consider the role of research in business communication, we invite you to ask yourself the following introspective questions:

How important is it to use reliable and factual sources and data when communicating in business?
Who is your audience? Do they require formal citation or other forms of attribution and credit?
How do you evaluate a source? How do you know if something is any good or not?

In this module, we will look at the above questions, and many more related topics around the idea of research. Before we begin, consider the messages in the following video from Microsoft Research:

https://youtu.be/jnVpC8qWO1s

What did you learn from the video? Broadly speaking, research is about finding out new things! In this sense, research can be fun and exciting. In this module, we hope you’ll be inspired to use research methods to learn new things, and communicate these new things effectively to people in your organization!