Understand the nature and purposes of research in the creative media industries

Primary research/self-generated research:

Primary research is when you go out and collect data to use in your project, this could be a questionnaire, a focus group, audience panels, internet forums, or even being and observationalist, just watching peoples everyday activities in a large area. We used this in our successful and unsuccessful movie project to find out if people wanted to see an unsuccessful film if we edited a new poster for it.

Secondary research:

Secondary research is when you collect data from a secondary source, this could be someone else's questionnaire, books, diary's, online archives as well as archives from the library, world wide web, CD Rom databases, statistics, etc. we used secondary research when we had to find the gross of our successful and unsuccessful films, also when we had to do our requirements for production piece we went on the UK film councils website as well as the BFI's page.

Quantitative research:

Quantitative research is closed questions involving numerical data, basically when you ask people questions involving numbers to gather information in a graph or chart about your research to make it easier to understand. For example, if I were to ask "what would rate this movie out of five?" that would be quantitative research. It easier to put all of this information in a graph then, all you need to do is load up Microsoft excel, organise your data and then open the graph tool to arrange it the way you want it.

Qualitative research:

Qualitative research is open questions where you search for the 'why' getting an in depth analysis on why they liked or disliked this product. For example, if I were to ask you "what would you rate this movie out of five" I would then lead on to say; "why did you rate this movie what you did?" that would be qualitative research.

Data gathering agencies:

Data gathering agencies are websites that do all the leg work for you and you just go onto the site and collect the results, this is a form of secondary research, examples of this would be the broadcasters audience research board (BARB), or the radio joint audience research Ltd (RAJAR). we used this also when we had to find the profit and loss of the two movies we chose, except we used IMDB and Box office mojo which are also classed as data gathering agencies.

Audience and market research:

Audience and market research is basically finding the target audience for a product and researching how well the product would sell if applying to that audience, when doing this you have to think of your audience data, demographics, geodemographics, consumer attitudes, product market, competition, etc. When doing our previous project, we had to think of these things when we had to re-brandish the unsuccessful movies to try and make them successful, what i mean by this is we had to think of a whole different marketing strategy towards this movie and to do this, we had to take these key facts into mind. For example, if I were to sell a product like skateboards, i would need to market it to a younger audience, it wouldnt fly off the shelves if i market them to elderly people.
 

Production research:

Production research is pretty much researching everything on a product to find out why it became successful, this uses all the types of research i have listed above. I used this to try and find out why the movie, Full metal jacket became so successful, and we also used this to find out how to create a winning depicT short film.

The three key things you need to know in doing this research properly are:

Reliability:

In doing the research, you will need to get a reliable set of answers, to do this you will have to follow these steps. If you're doing a questionnaire, make sure that you hand out over 10 surveys to an equally distributed amount of boys and girls. If you're using secondary research, then you will have to make sure you are getting it off a website that is 100% accurate and doesn't look like a fake site.

Validity:

When doing a questionnaire, you need to make sure that you are asking the right questions to get a better result, for example, instead of putting on the questionnaire 'are you between the ages of 8 and 80, to get a better result, ask if they are 0-5 years, 6-10 years, 11-15 years, 16-20 years, etc.

Repetitiveness and generalisability:

To avoid wasting time and question space, try not to use the same questions over and over again, for example, asking 'how often do you go to the cinema?' is essentially like saying 'how often do you go out to watch a film?' and try not to make it over complicated, an example of this is asking 'what genre do you prefer to go and see the most?' is like saying 'what genre do you like best?'