Case A
"To answer this question, I conducted a genre analysis of official and unofficial D&D sourcebooks and publications, hosted a survey for community members, and conducted interviews with my friends and players to provide me with their accounts and thoughts. While examining the genres of D&D allowed me to set the stage for this research, the answers from community members provided contrasting and complementary information to investigate further.”
Primary Research
Why? (The writer is describing research they personally carried out: a genre analysis, a survey, and interviews. The language “I conducted” signals that the evidence comes from the author’s own data-gathering process, not from other scholars’ published work.)
"I analyzed the transcripts for liking behavior, using the general trends from the survey as a guide. From the trends, I categorized groups of messages that had similar reasoning behind liking and deemed the category and specific reason behind liking.”
Primary research
Why?
The author is describing their own analytical work on collected data. The categories and interpretations are being generated by the researcher from their own evidence.
Additionally, a more recent analysis of why people like in group messaging social media applications was conducted by Gan (2017) for the popular Chinese application, WeChat. This study found that social factors, such as enjoyment and support, affected whether people would like in the application, similar to the results of Chin et al.’s (2015) study of liking in the context of Facebook conducted a few years earlier.”
Secondary Research
Why?
The writer is synthesizing multiple outside studies and comparing their findings. Its function is to map the existing conversation and create a basis for the author’s own study.
“These responses suggest that seating choices may reflect students’ attempts to manage visibility in the classroom.”
Overall, there has been much research conducted on emoticons as a form of communication within instant messaging chats, and there has been much research on the concepts of ‘liking.’ However, most researchers have not looked at how liking as a form of communication plays a role in group chats such as those facilitated by Facebook Messenger, GroupMe, and iMessage.
Secondary
Why?
The writer is reviewing the broader field and identifying what prior studies have and have not addressed. This move helps establish the research gap.
“WoTC has acknowledged the racist stereotypes in their publications and has since taken great steps to resolve these issues, such as hiring sensitivity readers and diverse writers and artists (Gault).
Secondary
Why?
The writer is using outside sources to provide context for their work.
"The linguist William Labov calls attention to the coherence in everyday speech—even by people whose speech is often disparaged: ‘Our own studies … of the grammaticality of everyday speech show that the great majority of utterances in all contexts are complete sentences…"
Secondary
Elbow is bringing in Labov’s study and quoting his findings as expert support. The writer is using outside authority to strengthen a conceptual claim.
"I found my sources by searching the University of Central Florida online library database, Google Scholar, and regular Google searches. To narrow my searches, I used the following words and phrases: ‘Dungeons and Dragons,’ ‘Stereotypes AND Fantasy,’ ‘Stereotypes AND Dungeons & Dragons,’ ‘Racism AND Dungeons & Dragons,’ and ‘Gender Identity AND Dungeons & Dragons."
Secondary
Why?
The writer is explicitly discussing how they located published scholarship and discussion from others. Even though this is in the methods section, the research being described here is the gathering of outside sources rather than original data.
“Analysis of group messages was conducted to see if the perceived meaning behind liking shown in the survey was the same as the actual meaning derived from group messages. These messages were pulled from two chats, one chat communicated via GroupMe and the other chat communicated via Facebook Messenger."
Primary
Why?
The author is comparing findings from their own survey and their own transcript analysis. Both sources of evidence are part of the writer’s original study.
“Halliday spells out this last point: ‘[T]he earliest examples of spoken language that were recorded for purposes of analysis were almost always specimens of intellectual discourse—academic seminars and the like. This tends to be the most disrupted kind of speech…’”
Secondary
Why?
The author is citing another scholar’s explanation to deepen the argument. Its function is not to present original data, but to extend and support the author’s reasoning through scholarship.