Confirming what you know and finding what you don't
When you’re conducting research and investigations, it’s easy to get sidetracked by opinions, expectations, and wishful thinking. Sometimes we hope for or have too much invested in a particular outcome. Other times, we rely on our usual tools and techniques and don’t consider their limitations. The technical term is cognitive bias, and it means that […]
As a professional investigator, I specialize in research, so most people assume I spend my days asking questions and running online searches. They picture me completing the search and sending results to my clients. Found it. Now I’m done. Move on to the next search. But, as you’ve heard me say, there’s more to research […]
Online searching is about much more than finding. Once you’ve run your searches, now what? And how did you get to the point of constructing some worthwhile searches? In a previous post, I listed several steps involved in the search process, and in this and future posts I’ll go into more detail about each step. […]
Research is research, right? As a private investigator and fraud examiner, I conduct a lot of research on people, companies, industries, and trends. Which is what I also did as a market researcher before becoming an investigator. Back then, I gathered information from online and human sources, looked for patterns, and transformed my findings into […]