The nature and purposes of research in the creative media industries

Primary/Self Generated Research
Primary research is research that you yourself have completed for yourself. This can include interviews, observations, focus groups and questionnaires. There are two types of data that can be generated from these research techniques. This is either quantitative or qualitative data. The primary research that I did was an semi structured questionnaire which allows the responder to give opinions and also yes or no answers. Which will give me both quantitative and qualitative which will allow my research to be varied. An example of my primary research is my questionnaire  http://www.smartsurvey.co.uk/landing.aspx

Secondary Research
Secondary research is research that already exists. This can come in the form of books, articles, statistics and other investigations of research that have already been made. This type of research is to help your own investigation so you wont have to start without anything about the documentary you are going to film. For example i used a documentary that had already been made on video games which gave me a lot of ideas on what to do with my own documentary.


Quantitative Research
Quantitative research is research that is usually data that can be converted into numerical form like graphs and charts. I acquired this data by using yes or no questions on my questionnaire as the results can be easily made into a graph. This can establish patterns and trends in your audience which makes it easier for you to identify your audiences needs and the things they like. This can really help to target a audience for your product as you can find out peoples interests and hobbies which can allow you to mold your product in favor of your audience.

Qualitative Research

Qualitative research is data that is usually presented in written form. To get this sort of data you can use unstructured interviews, observation and focus groups. Qualitative data is usually done with a very few people which means this type of research isn't representative so you can't use the individuals to represent your whole target audience as the people you interview usually have there own opinions which means we can't be sure that our target audience have his same opinion. The research can gain a greater understanding of individuals in your target audience and can be useful when targeting very specific audiences.In my questionnaire I had questions were i asked the respondent to give there opinions on my documentary.

Data Gathering Agencies
Barb ( British Audience Research Board) is a agency that monitors the ratings and the viewing figures of Britain

. This is pretty much a prime example of what a data gathering agency does. Barb isn't the only data gathering agency though, there are many others that collect different kind of data. IMDB.com

is a movie data base which has all research including grosses, ratings and other useful data. While on the subject of film statistics Boxofficemojo.com

is also a very useful site as it collects all the statistics of the Box office grosses of films. Many of these data gathering agencies can be very useful when creating a media product as the Internet is full of statistics that can be used to benefit film and TV
Audience and Market Research
The audience and market research I did for my 3 minute wonder documentary. The audience research I did is that I went on to Barb to research the most viewed channel because I thought that the channel with the biggest audience would allow me to generate the most response from people. In other media productions like the TV show Misfits

we can know that the audience the creators were trying target was teenagers. Seeing that the TV show is on E4 we can tell that the creators of misfits knew that teenagers were watching this channel at the specific time because of other channels that attract the audience like the big bang theory. In the creative media industry knowing you audience is crucial as it can determine whether or not the media product is successful or not. For my project I also used a questionnaire to distribute it to my class. As the class was filled with male and female teenagers this was perfect as my target audience was aimed at teenagers.
Production Research
This is research on the production of the media product. This includes processes like location recce's and whether you can get a location release for a particular location. For the production research for my documentary I had to make sure that any music tracks I was considering to use had no copyright licences that would cause the documentary to be removed from youtube. When carrying out the production research you must be aware of any of these copyright licences whether it be a prop or a music licence because it can determine whether it will be shown on youtube. There have been many of these copyright cases lead against movies in the film industry http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/blogs/thr-esq/disney-settles-pixar-luxo-jr-63447. Also within the media industry many other costs must be planned during the production research process. You will need to look up the costs of renting or buying equipment, renting out locations and using any acting talent.

Assessing Research Data

Reliability

Reliability is when you can get a good result every time. For my project I had made a questionnaire and for it to be reliable I would need a number of replies to the question to be reliable as with any other media product. As the number of respondents I had in my questionnaire the research wouldn't be considered reliable as there were only nine respondents. It also wasn't reliable as some individuals didn't take the questionnaire seriously which can be a very big problem in the TV and Film industry as this is a problem with questionnaires as people may not want to do them or you are not the to help them which can lead to misinterpretation.
Validity

Validity is when the data you retrieved is true picture of the research. For example in my class some people answered my questionnaire however as they know me do they just fill in the answers that I want answered. Making sure your research is actually true and valid is crucial within the TV and Film industry. If the research isn't true it could have a disastrous consequence if this was a high budgeted film. We can tell if these films had valid research of films from the gross that they made. The Cowboys vs Aliens film didn't do to well in the box office which we could assume that the research of the idea at first hand was more appealing to their target audience. Usually a movie has to make double the money of the production and distribution budget for it to be a profit. Cowboys vs Aliens production budget was $163 million and there world wide gross was only $174,822,325.
Representativeness and Generalisability
Some of the responses within my questionnaire weren't representative because I wanted to target the parents and teenagers however I only gained responses from teenagers. Representative means that you can get the responses and know that your target audience will answer the same way. When your respondents can be generalized this means that you can say that your target audience can say that they liked or disliked your idea. As with my questionnaire I can't generalize my target audience because there is to few responses for me to generalize.