Understand the nature and purpose of research in the creative media industry

Types/methods of research:

Primary Research/self-generated research

• Questionnaires
• Interviews
• Experiments
• Observations

In my research for successful and unsuccessful research I did questionnaires and partial interviews. I handed out a questionnaire for the original poster and handed out a questionnaire for the new and improved questionnaire, then I compared the results to each other  In a professional industry market research is important, as you have to target the right audience and know exactly what they want or your product won't sell.

Secondary Research

• Websites
• Books
• Newspapers
• Research that other people have found out

In my assignment I used lots of secondary research and relied on it heavily. The main sources were online such as Wikipedia and IMDB to find out facts and figures about the two films. In a proffesional industry secondary won't be much use unless you're surveying a complex and huge group of people, for instance, a whole country.

Quantitative Research

• Graphs
• Charts
• Statistics

This type of research is based on statistics and numerical data. Such as percentages and the amount of people who like something. In my own research for the two films I found out that 35.2% of people thought the first film was a comedy. In a professional industry facts and figures is heavily relied on for companies such as BARB, they total up the views on each channel to find out what programmes are being watched the most. This type of data is quick and easy to find out and doesn't rely on manual asking and one to ones with people. 

Qualitative Research

• Feedback
• Reviews
• Opinions

This type of research is largely based on opinions, not facts. These are usually asked as open questions and used to create discussions about a certain topic at hand. I used qualitative data in my own research however I did not use any of this in my presentation as it felt unnecessary since my presentation had to be quick and I only used numerical data. The feedback on my poster was a mixture such as 'I think the layout of the images works well and it would be a good film to see' and 'It would be a film I would enjoy seeing'. Examples of these in the actual industry are things like film reviews and critic reviews. They are opinions of a particular film and can't be classed as numerical data.

Data Gathering Agencies

• BARB
• RAJAR
• IMDB
• Box Office Mojo

Data Gathering Agencies gather information about the types of programmes/films people watch and the types of radio stations they listen to. BARB for instance, puts a box in people's homes, currently there are 5,100 of them and they are accountable for the whole of the UK. Each person who has this box represents 5,000 people, which gives an indication of what people watch. RAJAR is similar to BARB, but they record what radio stations people tune into. They do this to find out what type of people are watching a certain programme and they find out how well a channel is doing, this is used to help try and bring in audience ratings if they're lower than expected. 

Purposes of research:


Audience and Market Research

With audience and market research they find out the types of people that are consuming. Audience profiling is important if you want to target your product correctly. To audience profile, you need to look at these types of categories.

Demographics

-Age

-Race

-Class

-Gender

-Religion

-Social Group

Physcographics

-Consumer Attitudes

-Beliefs

-Behaviour

-Supply + Demand

In my own research, I handed our questionnaires, to find out the types of audience which would be likely to see the film based on my profile, so then I could target my poster correctly. I found out the age's, gender's and their attitudes towards the original poster, this all helped for me to create a better poster that targeted the correct audience. In the creative media industry audience profiling is key, as I have already said, if you don't target the right audience then the thing you're trying to sell to people won't sell.


Production Research

• Viability
• Personnel
• Cost/Finance
• Content
• Placement
• Location

Assessing Research Data:

Validity
The validity of some of the data is that the people you ask can not be honest about cenrtain questions. For instance on questionnaires, a few people might not be honest about their age and gender as they find it embarrassing. Another factor of validity would be people can distort their answers, this can be due to the sensitivity of the subject/topic or they don't feel the need to answer properly.

Reliability 
Reliability is about the consistency of these answers, for rather than giving out one questionnaire to one person who might not be honest about their answers, you hand it out to several people and see if the answers are consistent with each other. To see if the data is reliable; like all 'tests' you have to repeat it to get a range of answers that you can compare.

Representativeness and Generalisability  
As talked about earlier, audience measurement panels can give an indication of the public as a whole. But is it a true picture of the target audience? As for BARB, they hand out box sets which measure who is in the room and who is watching what TV programme. As said before each person represents 5,000 people. I don't think this is a true generalisation of the population however it is the closest and it's hard to measure accurately each individual's TV habits. 

References: ~click for links~

• Questionnaire Image
• Research Interview Image
• Newspaper Image
• Books Image
• Graph/Chart Image