The Nature and Purpose of Research in the Creative Media Industry

                           The Nature and Purpose of Research 



Primary research/self- generated research. 

Primary research is research which you collect first hand, for example go out of the way yourself and do interviews, questionnaires and survey's. There are a lot of different methods, the most popular is questionnaires for example https://www.surveymonkey.com is a good website for primary research because you can ad whatever questions you wish and analyze the results at the end is it useful. Interviews are also a very popular method they can be done in different ways either 2 people interviewing one person or vice versa usually it will be one main person who will have certain questions to ask the interviewee, and will write down answers etc so collecting primary research whilst conducting. I chose to do a questionnaire using survey monkey the questions i  asked were appropriate for the research i wanted to conduct, the results helped me a lot during the documentary we conducted interviews which was research. 








Here i have screen shoted some of the results on survey monkey, this is how they organised them, it is good for primary research as you can see one persons responses all together or see all of the questions together.









Secondary Research

Secondary research is a form where you will extract information from another individual for example, from their own research papers, auto biographies or referencing other forms of research and using quotes. I made a research post gathering all of the information we had gathered from questionnaires and also watched a few small documentaries and took notes from the way people with obsessions were asked questions. I also watched a documentary on BBC IPlayer called Obsessed which was about people who were obsessed with certain peoples and topics i got some inspiration from this for questions and the style of our documentary. 

Quantitative research 

Quantitative research can include surveys and customer questionnaires to help improve products and services, for example the survey i have included down below there are various different answers ranging from satisfied to dissatisfied this helps people who need a wide range of responses, it is more opinions than just straight answers and statistics.

Qualitative research

Qualitative research is about finding out not just what they think but why they think it/ have that opinion, they usually involve face-to-face interviews and group discussions to get in depth feedback from everyone it helps understand the product and your customers. It is designed to reveal a certain target audience's range of behavior and how they think of certain topics and issues, the qualitative research that i conducted for my documentary was asking people in my class (all who where within the target audience of 16-18 year old) and asked if the documentary type would be the type they would watch. 
















Data gathering agencies 

BARB (the Broadcasters' Audience Research Board are a company which deliver the official viewing figures for UK television audiences, BARB is good for assessing how programmes, channels or advertising campaigns have performed and is good for research, here is an example of one of their recent viewing figures.

IMDb is a website database which contains information for movies, TV and celebrity's they have over 100 million data items, it is one of the most popular websites for information and statistics, there are over millions of movies on there with all the information ranging from the plots, cast and little things like facts about the production etc. 



This is a screenshot of the top home bar and home screen as you can see they have a lot of variety in which data you can browse. It is updated constantly so always has new figures and trailers and updates of the latest things.




RAJAR is a radio joint audience research and it is the official company in charge of measuring radio audiences in the UK, it is co owned by the BBC and RadioCentre their mission is to be responsible for setting the research specification and overall quality control, they currently have 310 individual stations and results are published every quarter.   

Here are there most recent viewing figures, as you can see they narrow it down well and show it accurately and well presented. It shows that 89% of the population listen to the radio every week, and also gives us the details if they're adults or under 15 and the average tally. 





Audience and Market research

Audience research comes under any communication research which is conducted on specific audience segments to gather information about their attitudes, knowledge, interests or just preferences. Audience data is data which is collected by the person who is doing research it is usually displayed in graphs or charts like the RAJAR screenshot above. Audience profiling is a task in which all media institutions need to perform when they are creating a new product to launch onto the market, they have to define the audience with factors such as; age, gender, race, education, occupation, income or media interests, under audience profiling comes demographics and psycho-graphics.



Here is a demographic chart it defines the adult population by their job, they're broke down into 6 groups and are labeled using a letter code to describe the type of income and status of the members of each group. 

Then there is the way of describing an audience by looking at their behavior and personality traits, which is called psycho graphics it sorts you into your type of personality. 

Production Research

The research that we had to construct covered various things such as the content, the viability of the production (the budget and how viable it would be to make), locations, resources. The production research that we had to conduct was pre production work all of which was paperwork including; a budget sheet which included prices for any props which were needed (there was a £5 limit) a location release which had to be signed by the peoples who's location we were using for example my friend's house her dad had to sign the form which gave permission to film and use the house. A talent release form which was for people who were staring in the film they needed to sign and state their details then get an adult to sign it for them to confirm it, unless they were over 18 then they had to sign it themselves they sign this so we have permission to use their face in the film. There was also a production schedule which helped us with the content of the production as we had to write down all of the timings and location in which we were filming at, below is an example of a location recce which was for the pub we were filming at as you can see we have wrote all the specific requirements such as the time we need to film and the signature.