The nature and purposes of research in the creative media industries

Primary research
Primary research is a method of research in which one obtains information first-hand. It is where you have to go and research things by yourself rather than looking up things other people have already done. It is all self-generated. Examples of primary research would be; questionaires, interviews, surveys, general observations etc.

All of the primary research that I did was on the night of the filming. Because my documentary is an entirely observational one, it would not be right to do any primary research beforehand because that would make it feel staged. I knew that all the people would be there and that they were all actors or a part of the back-stage-help, so any other previously obtained research would not be necessary. Though, the fact that it is observational shows that the filming the documentary itself is the primary research.

Secondary research 
Secondary research is research that is obtained through searching for information that has been studied or found out by somebody else. This is not self-generated data. Examples of secondary research are: books, websites, newspapers, radio, TV etc.
Once again I did not do much secondary research because of the genre and subject of my documentary, BUT I did take inspiration from other observational documentaries like High School (1968). I really like the style of that documentary so I guess taking inspiration from it is, in a way, secondary research.

Quantitative research

Quantitative research is the type of form of what the actual research is, quantitative research is all about numbers. Examples of this type of data would be: programme ratings, peak audience times, hits on a website, box office figures etc.

The quantitative research that I did was all about the peak times of an audience, when an actual 3 Minute Wonder would be aired, and average ratings of what the programme gets.



Qualitative research
What are some examples? Film reviews, game reviews, fanzine websites, attitudes to media products, responses to news coverage, responses to advertising campaigns, discussion.

 Qaulitative research is the same as quantitative except instead of statitisical data, it is about opinion and spoken/written data. Examples: reviews, questionaires with 'comment boxes', people's opinions on things etc.

I sent out a questionaire to as many people as I could and got around 20 replies back. The questions that I did ask were about whether or not 'you' are personally interested in documentaries and whether or not one would be interested in watching a documentary on my subject. Though at the time when I made this questionaire, my documentary idea was different, so the answers were all about the first idea rather than what I actually filmed and made.



Data gathering agencies
1. Explain what the BARB does. Also, IMDB and Boxofficemojo can be mentioned.

BARB (Broadcasters' Audience Research Board) is the main data gethering agency that we learnt about. BARB is (from their website)  "the official source of television viewing figures in the UK. We continually develop new ways of measuring what you and the rest of the UK are watching." The way that they obtain quantitative data about what people are watching is by giving "participating viewers" a box on top of their TV set that records everything that they watch. At the moment, approximately 5,100 households (11,500 individuals) have the "box".

Another data gathering service focused on media is IMDb (Internet Movie Data Base). On IMDb millions of people (professional and non-proffesional) give information on related to films, television programmes and video games. They also review and rate everything that is on the site, making it easy for people to check anything about a film, programme, or game they are interested in.

According to Wikipedia -  "As of April 11, 2014, IMDb had 2,841,405 titles (includes episodes) and 5,826,213 personalities in its database, as well as 52 million registered users"      


Audience and Market research 


Audience and market reseach is about targeting what sort of audience would be interesting in watching your film. For example, a film-maker and production company might aim to make a film that would be targetly mainly to males between the ages of 16 - 24. It is all about demographics (quantifiable statistics about the population e.g) and psychographics (the study of personality, values, attitudes, interests, and lifestyles).

 Originally my documentary idea was to be an expository one focused on 'the beach', and I made a questionaire which targeted a range of people asking whether they would like to see a documentary on 'the beach', I had around 20 responses. The feedback was great, but because of a change of heart towards to idea I decided against it and went forward with the idea of 'Opening Night'. I did not do any solid market/audience research for this idea because of time issues. If I had more time I would have done the same thing that I did with the first idea but instead focus the questions on 'Opening Night'.

Production research

Production research is any research that is obtained to do with the actual filming of the film.
E.g. finance, storyboards, personnel, location etc.

I made sure that I was able to film on the night that I did, I gave a location release to the manager of the theatre and he was very willing and happy for me to film there. I also made sure that everybody I did film was okay with me filming, I also gave them forms which were talent releases. I gave talent releases to everybody and made them sign them even though I did not use everything that I filmed.
I had all of the equipment that I needed (camera and tripod). I did not plan any of the shots that I got, I just filmed in different places of the theatre following the actors.

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Assessing research data

Reliability

Reliability in data is a measure of how consistent your results are.
For example in the data from my questionaire, most of the people who had taken it said that they would be interesting in the documentary idea, so because the majority agreed with eachother without any communication between one another, making the data reliable. I did not have any troubles with reliability because the answers that were given were pretty unianimous.

Validity

Validity in data is a measure of how well your data correlates with what you were actually looking for. Most of the data I obtained was valid, but some of the questions were not completely clear to somebody who was/is not a media student. For example, in the questionaire I asked people how they felt about the format of a 3 Minute Wonder, but the not all of the answers were valid because they did not know what a 3 Minute Wonder was. If I were to do the questionaire again I would make sure that I had an example of a 3 Minute Wonder so that my feedback would be less confused. I knew that not all of the participants knew what a 3 Minute Wonder was because a two of my questions were "Do you know what a 3 Minute Wonder is?" and "Have you ever seen a 3 Minute Wonder?".


Representativeness and generalisability

The results from my survey were mainly from people aged between 17 and 25, though I did have some older participants also. I think that it was near enough equal female and male percentages. I think overall I had a good mix of people who completed my questionaire.