The Nature and Purposes of Research in the Creative Media Industry

The Nature and Purposes of Research in the Creative Media Industry

Primary Research:

Primary research is research that you undertake yourself for the product that you are making. Some examples of primary research are observations, focus groups, surveys and audience panels. To research the product that I made, I created a questionnaire using Survey Monkey, asking my target audience whether they would want to watch a documentary about cats. I also got their opinion on what they would like to see in my documentary.

Here is one of the questions I asked on my Documentary questionnaire. I done my best to think over the questions before I put them down so people could understand what I was asking and so that they would also answer my questions clearly so I can get an accurate response as possible.


Secondary Research:

Secondary research is researching what people have already done about the topic that you are investigating. Some examples of this are books, newspapers, government statistics, worldwide web and searching internet forums. For this research I used the internet and gathered as much information as I could.
 http://lovemeow.com/2012/12/top-20-amazing-cat-stories-of-2012/


On this website which had loads of stories about cats and their owners and how they found each other. I then found another website which informs you why cats do certain things. I then went onto YouTube and found some videos about cats. I found a video which is questioning whether cats love their owners for I done for this was looked on websites about cats and stories about them.



 I also found another one which goes for the argument that cats do love their owners. I also found a document which shows cats trying to get along with each other when they were brought separately as I would be filming families which have more than one cat. I then showed a funny/ cute video about cats as that's what is popular on YouTube.

Quantitative Research

Quantitative research shows the facts and figures of data you need when researching a product. Some examples are readership circulation figures, hits on websites, box office figures and programme ratings. I done this by looking on the TV guide website and seeing how many documentaries are scheduled over a period of a couple of days. I looked at Channel 4 and 5 for a couple of days and found that not many documentaries are shown but their is a variety of different forms of them that are shown on the same channel. I then went onto the ratings and found out that on most channels the most watched programme is a documentary. This helped me understand that documentaries are really popular.

Qualitative Research

Qualitative research is research that asks questions, shows how people experience things, meaning of things and feelings. Some examples of this is film reviews, game reviews, attitudes to media products, responses to news coverage, discussion and responses to advertising campaigns.

Data Gathering agencies:

Some examples of data gathering agencies are BARB, IMDB and Boxofficemojo. Getting data for this documentary I looked on the BARB website. BARB stands for Broadcaster Audience Research Board. This website shows us all the TV ratings in the UK. IMDB stands for Internet Movie Data Base which gives you all the information you need to know about actors, directors, films and upcoming films. 

Audience and Market Research:

Some examples of this is demographic, psychographic audience, consumer attitudes, audience awareness, competition and audience profiling. To see what target audience my documentary would be aimed towards I researched everything I needed to know about the psychographic and demographic audience. When I looked at the demographic audience I decided that my audience is for all ages apart from young children because everybody loves pets it just depends on a personnel opinion about whether or not you like cats. When looking at psychographic audiences I decided my audience would be mainstream because cats are a common hose hold pet.


Production Research:

For production research we have to make sure that before we start filming that we are allowed to film in the places we would like to film in, like people’s houses which is what I done. We had to fill out a form stating what our production budget was. We had to do a production diary showing that we have completed all the production paper work. We had to make sure that we could all get equipment that we needed but as the college already had some we could use theirs. As I was filming cats I needed some equipment called brackets which could help me film cats much easier.

Assessing Research Data:

Assessing the data I got from my questionnaire I found that people who done my questionnaire most of them said they would want to see a documentary about cats. I was able to identify that not

many people watch documentaries often which could show that even though there are loads of different types of documentaries that we found on TV guide some people may not realise that the programme they are watching is a type of documentary. Looking back at my questionnaire in the comments they made at the end the majority of people gave real answers but others gave silly ones that didn't quite help. I don't think that anyone rushed to do my questionnaire and took their time to do it as most of the questions were tick box answers which filling out surveys myself I find it a lot helpful and easier to do.

Representativeness and Generalizability:

My two TA were taken with the concept of my documentary and they stand for mainstreamers of the UK population. 

 

I used this website to get some information about BARB.

http://www.barb.co.uk/