Investigation topics
At this point you would have (hopefully!!) gone over the IB Guide and IA examplars, checklist and wrote a proposal for your investigation. The IB Guide gives you the full list of criteria you will be assessed against and includes examples of IAs of students that have been assessed against these criteria.
Judging by the assessment criteria, it is probably easiest to conduct a data analysis investigation, however, that is not the only topic in the syllabus that you can choose to explore. To be successful in the IA, do make sure that you follow the assessment criteria closely and make your investigation as personal as possible! In order to do this, try to choose something that you are actually interested in so that your learning and interest come through clearly in the IA.
Judging by the assessment criteria, it is probably easiest to conduct a data analysis investigation, however, that is not the only topic in the syllabus that you can choose to explore. To be successful in the IA, do make sure that you follow the assessment criteria closely and make your investigation as personal as possible! In order to do this, try to choose something that you are actually interested in so that your learning and interest come through clearly in the IA.
types of data
The biggest advantage of PRIMARY DATA is that you can easily justify and explain your data sampling. You can investigate something that perhaps no one has investigated before. You can collect and generate data that cannot be found online. However the disadvantage might be that you will need more time to collect the data in sufficient quantity and analyse it. To get a good mark, you should aim for at least 50 data points, ideally you will have between 60 to 100 data points so that you have a good amount of data to test and analyse.
Some of you might be thinking of using SECONDARY DATA. The main benefit would be to access good quality raw data that you wouldn't be able to collect yourself. You would also be able to save some time. However the data sampling methods might be difficult to justify (as you didn't do this yourself) and you could potentially have to wade through a lot of raw data to get to data that you need for your analysis. The data you find also might not exactly fit the question that you are trying to answer.
Some of you might be thinking of using SECONDARY DATA. The main benefit would be to access good quality raw data that you wouldn't be able to collect yourself. You would also be able to save some time. However the data sampling methods might be difficult to justify (as you didn't do this yourself) and you could potentially have to wade through a lot of raw data to get to data that you need for your analysis. The data you find also might not exactly fit the question that you are trying to answer.