Understand the nature and purposes of research in creative media industries

Types/methods of research 

Primary research/self generated research

Primary research is research you have conducted personally conducted
This could be questionnaires, Interviews  Observational ( semeological analysis), focus group, test screenings participant observation.  All of these are important as you will get out of it what you put in you can keep researching and adding more things to help reach your conclusions.

Secondary research

Secondary research is research conducted by a third party. This could be the internet, books journals periodicals, media, books, TV, archives.

This especially comes in handy when you are researching something that doesn't regularly appear in the public mainstream for example if you are researching Grand Prix racing in the 1990s like in "Senna". It would come in very handy too have access to archived footage of the races he had appeared in.

Quantitative research

Quantitative data is data that can be displayed numerically, fixed facts, percentages, box office data, closed questions. This is the way that many large companies research profitability in markets some great examples would be some of the websites listed below (see Box Office Mojo, Barb, Ofcom, Rajar) While researching the "Green lantern" poster recreated I used the website's Survey Monkey and Facebook to question people on there perspective of the advantages and faults of the poster. Some examples of the quantitative data used where graphs like the one below that showed the percentage of what genre people thought the film was meant too be. This was extremely useful as then this showed me what my target audience generally tended to watch.

Qualitative research

Qualitative data is the opposite open questions that are not just yes or no but they are more detailed. A great example of this would be interviewing in the documentary film that looked into the "Star Wars" films "Empire of dreams" they conducted interviews some thirty years after the films had been completed to make the documentary. The best summary of this is still more personal in depth questions and responses that look beyond facts to something more subtle. Open ended questions are although generally more time consuming a better example of what you are looking for in a question.

Data gathering agencies

Rajar:

Rajar is an official body in charge of monitoring radio audiences across the UK they are jointly owned by the BBC and the Radiocentre. They produce data showing the listening figures across the country.

Barb:

Barb is a body that records television viewing figures. Its commissions smaller research companies and combines their findings to generate viewing figures for television shows across the country.

Ofcom:

Ofcom regulate TV and radio, telecoms and the airwaves wireless devises work on. they analyse and record  the following things shown in the screen shot below among others.


IMDb:

IMDb is an online database that covers almost 2.5 million films and over 5 million people in the film making trade.Its incredibly useful for looking into upcoming releases and for when looking back on the careers of personality's.


Box office Mojo:

Box office Mojo is a subsidiary of IMDb that mathematically tracks the revenue of films. It comes in most handy when looking into production budgets compared to the money the film generated.


Purposes of market research

Audience and market research

Audience
Audience profiling

Audience profiling is detailing the right audience too put what you are marketing across too. You must do this to market the product in the most effective way.


Demographics 
Demographics are the quantitative measurement of the people you market a product to. examples of this would be age, gender, ethnicity, class, where you live (Geo-demographic) all of these are generally quantitative data the sort of thing you would be able to turn into graphs and percentages.

Psycho-graphics

Psycho-graphics are the personal measurement of attitudes  values, behavior interests and opinions. These are a lot more difficult too attain due to it being highly individualistic of how people understand and how they choose to react to things but is very useful in marketing and advertising.  An example of this is the study called UK tribes which highlights teenage ideology's across the country. All of this is generally qualitative data and is great for painting a picture about what people of a chosen demographic or market might also buy or want but it isn't very useful for much else as it cant be generalized.

Market

Your market is different to your audience is where you are selling your goods not too. This would be trying to make the film for the lowest price possible and then sell it to reach the greatest profit.

Production research

Production research is when you are researching you market audience and demographics too make sure there is enough people wanting too see this. This is direction-ally proportional to the production and inevitable marketing budgets as well. The things you need to take into account are the regions (locations) you are selecting this research from,

Assessing research data

Validity 

Asking the right audience is key as your information is worthless if you are asking the people your not trying to sell your product too.  Rounding figures is always a bad idea as your not looking for a more simple way too understand the data you have collected you are looking for exact figures to make.  When researching information you need to make sure your participants answer the questions realistically and too the parameters of the questions. Under certain circumstances you need to be aware of interviewer affects where the person you are questioning might over elaborate or exasperated in the effort of pleasing you.

An issue with validity I sometimes find is that unseen people are more than willing to fill in vulgar answers which degrade the quality of my research. I generally makeup for this however by disregarding them as anomalous results.

Reliability 

Reliability is different instead making sure your a collecting the right data you need to make sure that what your comparing the data for is what you need. Some of the things you need too make sure are: All conditions between repeat testing are the same (this is if you choose to repeat trials) making sure conditions are the same make it appropriate repeating.

Representativeness and Generalisability 

This is your ability to generalize the information you have gathered over perhaps a larger area than your research reached. an example of this would be too conduct research over a group of 100 people then times it so its proportional to the entire country its not nearly enough and doesn't take into affect the different parts of the country that might not be applicable to the research method for might have a different ideology connected.