The Nature and Purposes of Research

The Nature and Purposes of Research - blog post

Your blog post title: The nature and purposes of research in the creative media industries.

Research is fundamental to all aspects of creative media production and is the essential starting point for productions of any scale. It can be used to determine the financial viability of a future production, to gather a range of information relevant to the content of the production, or to assist with the planning of technical and logistical requirements.

There are also media companies which conduct extensive research using a range of sophisticated methods to gather data about audience consumption of media products and services. This has become increasingly necessary in the highly mixed and competitive environment media industries operate in. But an ability to undertake research is essential for anyone working in the media industries and is vital in many stages of production and distribution.

To complete this unit you need to demonstrate that you understand why and how research is conducted in the creative media industries. The maximum word limit is 1000 words. Remember to proof read your work before submission and check for spelling, punctuation and grammatical errors.  As always use examples of your own research from your documentary.


Types/methods of research:

Primary research is led by you. This research can contain interviews, questioners as well as observation.

My primary research consisted of a questionnaire. This questionnaire was created in order to see what my target audience’s response towards my topic is. In the industry interviews can be used in order to find why the reasons behind certain trends happen. 

Secondary research
What are some examples? Books, journals, reference-based books and directories, periodicals, newspapers, film archives, photo libraries, worldwide web, searching internet forums, CD Rom databases, audio material, ratings, circulation figures, government statistics.

For our secondary research we had to use TV listings to see how much time  was covered on TV by documentaries in a week. We had to choose two channels for our research; Channel 4 and one other; BBC
Quantitative research
 Programme ratings, readership circulation figures, hits on a website, box office figures, sales of CDs and DVDs.

Quantitative research is the data that can easily be transferred into figures and it can be used to establish trends and patterns. This data can be analysed by using charts, table and graphs which can be compared to other similar research.

To obtain this I created a questionnaire using online tools such as Survey Monkey as the social media in order to distribute the questionnaires to as many people as possible across a broad range of ages.

This is research that uses written data such as web pages, journals and diaries as well as interviews and observations in order to obtain a broader view that cannot be generalised to a measurable fact; quite often this is opinion. 

I used websites in order to obtain information on the topic chosen. These websites consisted of news articles, videos as well as some Forums. I collected the information by making notes; some of these notes were collated in small chunks of information that were linked. The information that was not completely relevant to the topic was kept aside.


Data gathering agencies


BARB Broadcasters' Audience Research Board and is the official source of television viewing figures.BARB uses viewing figures in order to create trends and also to see viewing patterns and behaviours. They also have development schemes to find new ways to capture this information. IMDB, The Internet Movie Database (abbreviated IMDb) is an online database of information related to films, television programs, and video games, taking in actors, production crew, fictional characters, biographies, plot summaries, and trivia. Boxofficemojo is a website that allows you to see the box office charts for different countries; this is important to know as it creates trends in which genres a film is more popular than others.
Purposes of research: 

The purpose of research is to discover the target audiences for certain products as well as knowing how to brand a product in order to achieve the best target audience and to sell the product. Research is also used to create and to adapt new ideas for the market. It is used to keep up to date.

Audience and Market research.

Market research is done in order to see how the  product is wived . To This we looked the amount of time is occupied by documentaries. To this that listing sites were used in to find the number of hours that are accorded to dictionaries.For example i found that have around  34 h hours airtime a week

Reliability

The questionnaires were accessed via email or Facebook which meant that they were done on line and could give a fast response rate however some people could not access it by these methods and it would have been only people that would have known me so it could be affected by some bias. 

 This could have been eause  Some of my questions were not specific enough; for example I asked if the audience had heard or watched “Three minute wonder”. I would not know from their yes / no response which was the right answer and so would not know if they had actually seen it..
 The number of respondents was small, only,10 out of a possible 200 plus and possibly some may not have taken it as seriously as they should have. 

Validity

1. What are some examples? Any survey/questionnaire etc., where one or more people are asked/tested.The research was conducted via suvey The biggest problem was the small number of number of which could have affected the validity of my results.However  I believe that People  said and dd not lead them to and answer.

Representativeness and generalisability

This method of data collection also was influenced by the fact that most of the people on Face book are of my age and potentially interested in the same things as me. This means I will not have collected a wide range of information for my research.