Understand the nature and purpose of research in the creative

Types/methods of research

Primary research/self-generated research

This is research that is collected by you and not copied from another source, for instance I collected information on a poster myself using a questionnaire and an online survey which gave me direct information from people themselves and I could process that information for a use in a presentation.There are also companies like BARB which stands for Broadcasters audience research board which is an audience research organisation, and have similar companies that do a similar job; there is RAJAR which is the radio joint audience research. These people do the exact same job as BARB but for the radio. This is called primary research which can come in the form of interviews, observation focus groups, participant observation and this is analysed in the form of video, audio, written or photographic. Self-generated research is a specific type primary research where you gather data from your own activities. For example if you take some video footage of an event yourself, then analyse it later.

Secondary research

This is research that has been collected by other people and has been given for use of the public. This comes in the form of the Internet, books, journals and archives. If you wanted to do a research piece on a specific subject like the introduction of American crayfish into Britain and their effect on the local species of crayfish, you would have to look at any documents, press pieces and documentaries to get all the informaton you need making it secondary research.

Quantitative research

This is research data that is concerned with the numbers on the research which come in the form of amounts and fixed categorise which can be in the form of age, gender, religion and ethnicities. They can include things like box office takings, for example Box office mojo. Another example would be the amount of hits a website gets; a group that creates this sort of quantitative research is www.Alexa.com, they monitor how many hits a website has and load it up to their database. You can do this for films as well, for example you to take a percentage of how many eighteen year olds are a fan of action movies. You could take this with a closed questionnaire, which is simply a sheet with yes or no ticking boxes. I did this when I researched DOMINO (A Tony Scott), because I needed to find out wheather people would watch the film based on the poster and how well the film did at the box office.

Qualitative research

Qualitative research is research that isn't easily expressed numerically; this is because qualitative date is word based diaries, interview, questionnaires etc.; this is hard to put into numbers. These can range from film reviews, fan blogs, altitutes, news stories and responses to adverts. These can be collected by interview, focus groups like PRG (prime focus group) which deal with film. You also have open question techniques like online surveys and posting questionnaires to the public. I did this when I re-designed a poster for the Tony Scott film DOMINO so I knew what people wanted to see in a poster and once I had re-designed it, I made sure it did its job as a poster and appealed to its target audience.

Data gathering agencies

These are agencies that collect and catalogue data in particular areas like film, TV and radio. BARB (Broadcasting audience research board) are a company who enlist the help of members of the public who have a digital box set up with their television so whatever they watch can be recorded and put into a survey that is put together to show statistics of how many people watch what shows. IMDB (Internet movie data base) is a website that collects information on movies, giving information on the budget of the film the box office takings, what people think of the film and information on the cast and crew. They also collect information on actors including their previous work and basic information on them personally. Box office mojo is a website that specifically handles details with the budget and the box office takings and distribution details including how many countries and cinema's a film was distributed to and how much money it made in that country. RAJAR is a lot like BARB as in they take the results of what people listen to on the radio and put it into a survey giving information on how many people are listen to what on the radio. The collects listening data every quarter hour between 06.00 and 24.00 and by half hour between 24.00 and 06.00 and they do this by recruiting everyday people to represent the view of the nation by setting up a recording box inside or next their radio and once the data is collected in is automatically sent to the RAJAR.

Purpose of research

Audience and marketing research

The audience data is a very important to a company; they have to know what an audiences opinions are on things and how much of the audience is watching/buying. If you know this then you can stopping showing/selling projects/products that are not selling or supply the demeaned for project/products that are. It is good to know what is popular and what isn't; which is another part of audience research meaning you know what people want. It is also important to do marketing so you know how to market your project/product but what is extremely important is doing audience profiling; this basically means what kind of audience you are appealing to. You must know things like the demographics, which means what gender, class, age, race and religion which splits off into a separate section called geodemographics. You also need to know psychographics which is what the audience is attracted to according to their beliefs, values, ideologies and views, you need to know the consumers attitudes and behaviours and if they are part of a mainstream or niche market; for example the latest James Bond film Skyfall falls neatly into the category of mainstream as it is a big selling well marketed film that has many people following the James Bond series and the film itself made over a billion dollars. If you take a film like Dead Snow it is going to be for a niche audience who are fans of the zombie and horror genre and as it wasn't marketed well it was only taken an interest in by those kinds of fans; this the same in music, a band like Take That is recognised worldwide and is clearly mainstream, while if you take a band like System Of A Down they are primarily a niche audience. Sometimes you get a band or singer who start off with a niche audience in a niche genre but expand into the mainstream audience sometimes taking the genre with them increasing both theirs and there genre's popularity e.g. Taylor Swift.

Production research

This is something that takes place during the pre-production of a film; it is looking at things like the locations of where the film will be shot, the placement of it, the kind of content it will have (props, special effects actors esc) and it will also look at the viability, the costs of the film and importantly the personnel of the film. We had to do this when we made our adverts. We needed to write everything down in pre-production so we knew things down to the finer details like when we were filming, where we were filming, what we needed equipment wise and prop wise. We needed to now who we needed on what days and most importantly what we were planning to film.

Assessing research data

Validity

When doing things like questionnaires and surveys you always have to take into account that people are not always honest about what they put down. They might be putting down what they think you want to hear some people will lie about information that might concern themselves or information and of course you will always get someone who doesn't take it seriously.

Reliability

So you can make sure your data is reliable you should always repeat your tests under the same conditions or maybe change some to see what the results are; this is needed to keep a test accurate and reliable. To put your audience research to good use, compare results and put your findings together. This way you can see how your results differ from someone else's or your own previous results so you can see what changes time or enviroments make to results.

Representativeness and generalisability

When taking in results you need to make sure that it is a true picture the target audience. You cant ask a class of sixteen to eighteen year olds if they prefer sci-fi to action films; if most of the class said action and you put it down as your results saying most teenagers prefer action over sci-fi you only have the findings of one class. You need to ask a large selection of teenagers to get a true picture. Your also have Audience research panels which take the findings from an audience and put them into a set of results. A group who do this is tuned-in research which does the research for local communities with their opinions on their villages and put it together for the village council to see.