The Nature and Purposes of Research in the creative media industries

Primary research/self-generated research

Primary research is your own research which you got yourself. It is newresearch, carried out to answer specific issues or questions. It can involve questionnaires, surveys or interviews with individuals or small groups.

For primary research I created questionnaires, surveys on http://www.smartsurvey.co.uk/ to gather information and get peoples views about a certain topic which I wanted to know more about and what an audience thought about it. Gathering the information first hand helps you because you get to ask questions/find out the specifically what you want to know.  

For my project I created a survey about my documentary with questions that will help me when creating my documentary. The questions I wanted to know was how many people actually liked documentaries so I could get a rough idea how successful and popular documentaries are. But most importantly I asked what people thought of my documentary idea which tells me if my idea is good and would be watched by my target audience. 

Secondary Research

Secondary research is research carried out with already existing data, making use of information previously researched for other purposes and publicly available. Secondary research includes published research reports in a library, books, newspaper, journals, magazines, surveys and information on the internet. For my project I used secondary research when creating my documentary to find out more information in depths about my topic by exploring the history of dogs through the ages and why people own dogs by looking at the benefits of owning pets. To do this I used websites  to find this information. 

Qualitative Research

Qualitative research is more in-depth information and understanding of opinions,motivations and feelings by finding out what people think and why they think it. Some methods of qualitative research include face to face interviews, group discussions (typically small groups) and participation/observation. This makes qualitative research great when creating a new product or marketing campaign because this type of research gives in-depth feedback and see peoples reactions and discuss different approaches and ideas. Other examples are reviews for games or films because people share their own opinions about a certain game or film and backing up why they think it. 

Here is a film review of Man of Steel:http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/man-of-steel-2013

I used qualitative research when creating my documentary in my survey to find out peoples opinions on documentaries and the type of documentaries they watch and if they would watch a documentary about dogs. Example:

"What type of documentaries do you already watch?"

"Documentaries about games, for example "The King of King" or "I am Street Fighter".

Historical(WW2, Ancient Cultures) and Nature(Dinosaurs and similar) 

I also used qualitative research in my documentary by having a number of face to face interviews with dog owners and asked them questions about their dogs such as why did you get a dog? and what difference has having a dog made in your life? etc. 

You can watch my documentary here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x7II3faGOMo

Quantitative Research

Quantitative Research includes surveys and questionnaires. Quantitative Research is asking people for their opinion in a structured way like collecting numerical data that are analysed using mathematically based methods such as statistics. To get reliable statistics results it is important to survey a large amount of people.

 Quantitative research is also a great way to see programme/film ratings, box office figures, sales of DVDs/CDs and hits on a website. This is very handy to see if your product is successful and popular with an audience. For example if you look at the box office figures for Godzilla, it scored the biggest opening day of 2014, ruling the box office with $38.5million made on the opening day. These box office figures tell the producers of the film that their distribution methods and film is successful and very popular with the public.

For my project I used quantitative research in my survey to see how many people I surveyed watch documentaries, heard of 3 minute wonders and if they would watch a documentary about dogs. Quantitative research here helped me see clearly how many people are interested in documentaries and helps determine if my topic idea is good and if it would be watched by an audience.

Here is an example of one of my questions from my survey:

Data Gathering Agencies

Data gathering agencies are responsible in collecting and maintaining company specific data. Some examples include Broadcasters Audience Research Board (BARB) which is an organisation that collects audience measurements and television ratings in the United Kingdom.

Here you can see the total viewing summary of all the channels on BARB and shows BBC1 is the most popular channel: -->

Other examples are Radio Joint Audience Research Ltd (RAJAR) is also a data gathering company very similar to BARB but collects measures radio audiences in the United Kingdom instead. Internet Move Database (IMDB) which collects information related to films, television programmes and video games such as the actors, crew, finance, etc. And Box Office Mojo which is an online movie publication and box office reporting service which is similar to IMDB but focuses on Box Office revenue and more finance of movies.

Audience and Market Research

 Some examples of audience and market research include audience data, audience profiling, demographics, geodemographics, psychographics,consumer behaviour, consumer attitudes, etc. Audience and Market Research is important when trying to sell a product because the general public are your consumers and it is very important to know about the target audience you're selling to. This is what Audience and Market Research is for, it helps gather information about consumers and learning about your target audience will help successfully sell a product in                                                       the long run because you know your audience and what they like.

 For my audience research for my project I went on the BARB website and researched channel 4 because that is where 3 minute wonders are shown and I am creating one of my own. I also used audience and market research in my survey about documentaries and 3 minute wonders. I had demographic questions asking people their gender and age which will help me determine roughly the age and gender 3 minute wonder documentaries appeal to. This help me determine my target audience for my documentary.

Production Research

Production research is the collection and analysis of information for the content and production of a media product. For example viability, finance, costs, technological resources, personnel and locations. For my project I needed a location release to get permission from the people I interviewed to use their property for filming. I also did a location scout to work out the day and time I will be interviewing. I also needed to do talent releases to get an agreement from the interviewee that I have permission to film them.

Assessing Research Data

Reliability

My our Brut Advert and my documentary I created a survey/questionnaire where I asked a number of people to answer them and I managed to get quite a few answers on my advert survey but not so much on my documentary one. Getting a good amount of answers is important to make your research as reliable as possible. The problems identified for my documentary survey is that I did get many answers, I only got 12 and wanted at least 20 to make my research more reliable. For my Brut Advert survey I got a good amount of answers to make my results reliable however some people didn't take it very seriously, meaning that I couldn't use their answers.

Validity

For my documentary survey I think people did answer truly and what they believe because I got a nice mixture of different answers in my survey. I also think people did think about the questions because for one of my questions I asked "What type of documentaries do you watch?" and I received a list of different documentations from people, e.g. "Homeless people, Drugs, Space, Wildlife and E-sports.". 

For my Brut Advert I also think people answered what they believe but some people I think rushed the question and didn't really think about or answer it fully and didn't help me at all. For example I got some answers

like "eh, I don't know.", "The End", "I have no idea" and "It was all pretty good" etc.

Representatives and Generalisability

I think my participants were representative of the population, however I would have liked more answers from my target audience being more aimed at a more middle age/older age group as they are usually the people who buy/own a dog. But generally I think my target audience was interested in the concept of my documentary as 58.3% of them said they would be interested to watch a documentary about dogs.