The Nature and Purposes of Research

 

 

Primary research is when you find out information yourself by using various methods. One of the examples is by sending out a questionnaire for people to fill in to get a larger review of the subject you doing. The questions are mainly based up of yes/no questions with some question with boxes for people to write in. You also have interviews where you ask people the question and note the answers that the give. In my documentary I used a questionnaire to ask people about the topics that where featured in the documentary. https://app.smartsurvey.co.uk/survey/editor.asp?i=107430

Secondary research is when you get information from existing places like the Internet,  newspaper articles and books. This is a good way for you to find out lots of facts about the chosen subjects. This is why I chose to look on the Internet at existing facts about diabetes, depression and anxiety. I found lots of stats and facts about them, this helped me to find out how big the target audience. I used this information to say how many people suffer with these conditions.

Quantitative research is where you find out what documentaries are most loved and best reviewed. You do this by going on to existing websites that tell you by charts and graphs which show you data and facts about your chosen subject. I used this in my documentary because it was the best way to find facts about anxiety, depression and anxiety. This is shown in my primary research where it says how many people suffer with anxiety in the UK.

 

Qualitative research is where you find reviews that people or existing websites what review movies and documentaries. The worlds biggest movie review is IMDB (http://www.imdb.com/). Or you can look at fan pages, where people leave there reviews on a film. I used to help with m research because I could look at existing documentaries with the same theme as mine, and look what comments they said could be improved or hat was good about it.

 

Data gathering agencies is websites that have collected data on the views and ratings of all media productions. BARB is a good website that shows you all channels, and which programmes had the most views on each day. This helped me with my documentary because it shown me what channels where best to show a documentary on, and what documentaries are most viewed. the other good example of this is IMDB, this is the world's biggest review site. They rate all movies and TV series. I looked at both of these sites because they give you a understanding of what type of documentaries are most liked and what time of day and channel it would be shown on TV. 

 

To find out who my audience and market research was I first sent out a questionnaire asking questions about my topic of choice. One I had gathered the results it shown my what people had thought about my chosen documentary. I did some previous research on the topic, and the results that I found shown that there where lots of people suffering with the same conditions. This showed me that there was a large audience that would be attracted to the documentary.

 

Production Research

The purpose of market research in the media is to determine whether or not a media production will be acceptable amongst all of the demographics. for example age, gender, location and many more. This is used so people within these categories are not offended my anything in the documentary. I had to follow the rules from BCAP by not having any offensive images because people under 18 could be watching the 3 minute wonder.

 

Assessing research data

 

Reliability

The best ways to get reliable data is from surveys and questionnaire. We also went through each of our documentaries in class. I did a survey and questionnaire because you can get more people, of different ages and sex to answer the questions. This means the more responses you get the more reliable the data is. After looking back at my responses from the other people in my class they said that they liked that idea and story of the documentary, but there where some little areas that I needed to improve on. One of the comments where that they wanted more speaking from my dad. Also they wanted more shots of us doing everyday jobs over the speaking. Most of the comments that I got back from the questionnaire where serious and wanted to know more about the subjects, but I did get some comments where silly so I had to get rid of them and work out the percentage of people that was serious about the subject.

 

Validity  

In the questionnaire, most of the people that responded to it had put what I wanted them to put. But I was surprised on how little people knew about the subject, but where willing to know more about it. Some people had rushed the questionnaire as them left a few questions blank. The questions that most people left blank where the ones that I left a comment box so they could write in more detail an answer to the answer.

 

Representativeness and generalizability

The people in the video where real people who have gone through them troubles. There where no false acting involved in the documentary, they where just telling their story and opinions right there on the spot. the people involved where from different ages so this can represent the population as we have people from all age categories. this is why I think the target audience liked the documentary because they believed the people in the documentary and that they could relate to the same things they where going through.