The Nature and Purpose of Research

Primary research is new research; this is carried out by yourself to answer specific issues or questions. It can involve questionnaires, surveys or interviews with individuals or small groups. When trying to collect primary research I made my own surveys and asked other students to fill them in and done some questionnaires with my class.

Secondary research is where you take information that you have not collected first hand. This is basically using someone else’s research for yours. The can be using books, magazine articles, videos and documents. For this I used videos on YouTube where it shows the reactions to horror movies. I also used magazine and news articles of how people fainted in the cinemas watching the films to gain an understanding of how the film genre affected people.

Qualitative research is mostly exploratory research. It is used to gain an understanding of underlying reasons, and motivations. It provides insights into the problem or helps to develop ideas or hypotheses for potential quantitative research. For this I looked at things like Film and game reviews and responses to news coverage and responses to advertising campaigns.

Quantitative research is the systematic realistic investigation of observable phenomena via statistical, mathematical or computational techniques. For this I used things like sale numbers of CD’s and DVD’s and things like box office figures or programme ratings.

Data gathering agencies are companies like BARB (Broadcasters Audience Research Board) and RAJAR (Radio Joint Audience Research Ltd).  BARB is an agency created to provide figures based on audience numbers and trading metrics. IMDB is another company that records this data, but they mostly record the profits that the movies make on release and over time.

Purposes of research:

Audience and market research is gathering data from different audiences on their thoughts on different things and the research of the amount of profit the market is making on the different item. For this research we sent out surveys to the other students within the college asking them different things about the adverts and movies we made so that we could gather figures on what they liked and disliked about our work.

Production research can range through a number of different things, such as content, viability, placement media, finance, costs, personnel and locations. For this we had to calculate the cost of the different props and travel for making our movies. We also had to get forms signed to allow people to star in our movies and so that we could film in certain locations within the college and around Norfolk.