The nature and purposes of research in the creative media industries

Primary Research

Primary research is obtaining unique information gathered by using self-generated research methods such as questionnaires, focus groups and observations. Primary research is very important in the media industry. Primary research enables researchers to build on their skills and gain knowledge regarding the concepts and ideas that are used within the media industry.

For example, I created a survey to gather opinions about mental health. I had an advantage while collecting participants for my survey as a range of mental health and safeguarding advisors were readily available. This provided me with a rich source of information by gaining an experienced perspective of mental health.

Another example of primary research I engaged in was a questionnaire to ask others if they would be interested participating in the documentary and also questioning them on their interest in mental health, so that we were able to collect a range of people that were interested in mental health and those that were not.

Secondary research

Secondary research is an indirect form of research which another individual has already produced to be extracted and expanded on further. Examples include reference-based books, journals, the internet, databases, material ratings and especially government statistics in our case of our documentary based on mental health. I produced a research post gathering our information that we had collected into one document to explain the sources where our information was collected from and how it was to be used. For example I used a youtube clip that was based around a similar idea of how we wanted to present our documentary, by interviewing a range of different people and asking them firstly factual questions about mental health and then diving this into systematic questions about whether or not people were interested in mental health and why. I also looked into what mental health organisations do for the younger generation. I did this by researching onto their actual sites via the internet, at support services available to younger individuals.

 I also looked into official statistics to grasp accurate evidence that would reflect an argument within the documentary.

Quantitative research

This type of research is a data-led one, where it is includes opinions from what people think from a numerical/ statistical point of view, examples like programme reviews, hits on a website or sales on DVD's and CD's. The type of quantitative research I took part in was an opinion poll showing at the age where people are most affected by mental health, I used this to reinforce the view that young people who are most affected by mental health in Here are examples from my documentary.

Qualitative research

This type of research is where the opinions of people are collected more in-depth and do not include statistical figures. Examples include Film reviews, Game reviews, attitudes to media products, responses to advertising campaigns and responses to news coverage. An example from my research could be the questionnaire I conducted because part of that lets the individual expands on their response in a written format. This provides a rich source of information that would not be gathered from numerical data. Additionally the interviews I conducted for my documentary could also be classed as Qualitative research as the answers were based on personal opinion.  

Data gathering agencies

B.A.R.B is an example of a broadcasting agency, it is the organisation that works with TV ratings and audience measurements, researching and giving information to the public domain to show what's popular and what's not and to show reviews of what people like when watching a broadcast.

Another data gathering agency is IMDB, it is a large collection of entertainment information and creators including predominantly movies and TV programmes. IMDB were originally started by a group of movie fans that indulged themselves into the findings behind movies and the deep detail into them. This includes how and where the films are made and why they are made.

Box office mojo are another data gathering agency.'Box Office Mojo is an online movie publication and box office reporting service. our purpose is to illuminate the movies through the integration of art and business. They also have a copyright policy, where less than 20 names/titles of filmography on non-commercial websites can be used, magazines and information boards as long as the source they are gathered from are referenced.

Purpose of Research

Audience and Market Research:
There are many ways to conduct audience and market research in order to know how to target your media product to the appropriate audience. For example, Geo-demographics is how opinions and views can be varied based on where the individual lives, for example a 18 year old male living in Norfolk will have different views and opinions from a 18 year male who lives in London. Demographics is more about the different views and opinions of those in different social classes and locations.

An example of audience and market research I conducted was through the questionnaire on survey monkey, asking first if the responded is a male/ female, to see if the results show that there is a difference in interests between sexes, as mental health is known from the past and arguably the current that it is predominantly males that have a interest and take part in politics. Additionally there is a question on age as it is argued that older people are more interested in mental health and this is where the idea for a documentary comes about.

From the results we can see it is predominantly males that had an interest in taking part in the survey seeing as it was about mental health, this is how we received our market research and incorporated this into our documentary by interviewing equally males and females. 

The age responses is what I predicted as I wanted to target the young audience and see if they are responsive to the survey and as we can see from the results, we can see that it was that age range that was interested in taking part. This is why we interviewed people of this age range to make it compatible with the results we gained from this survey.

Here we can conclude the first two questions effected this question about interest, showing it was mainly males who took part in the survey and seeing that most of the respondents do have an interest in mental health, therefore could argue it is mostly males who are interested. Also we can see that the idea of our documentary about young peoples apathy to mental health is that there is an interest there, this was effective because we had to incorporate this into the interview questions we asked and how we produced our documentary.

Production research

Equally as important as audience research is production research, particularly in a documentary format where you can potentially miss interesting and exciting moments if you are not aware of when and where they are happening. Production research includes viability of the production, financing, technological capabilities, locations and personnel. For our mock election production, as previously mentioned, Reuben and myself attended several meetings with the team who were organising and participating in the mock election event. This gave us the ability to get to know people through the talent release forms, as well as finding out key dates when important events would be taking place. From this we were able to produce a production schedule and we consulted this daily to ensure we had the required equipment and personnel available to us.

here is a link to my pre-production research -----------