Research Techniques Essay

3.1 Research techniques for the creative media industries

In this essay I will discuss the advantages and disadvantages of research techniques used in the creative media industry, in addition, I will explain the methods in which they use to find information and furthermore I will also be discussing in detail about the purposes of research.

The types of research that the creative media industries use are primary, secondary, qualitative and quantitative. Primary research is research done by yourself and what you know about something whereas secondary research is the type of research done by others that you use to help you understand the subject.

The advantages of primary research are that it is research that you yourself have done so it is more reliable, however the disadvantages are that you wont get someone else’s view on the subject and they might not have enough information about a certain thing unless they use secondary research. McQeen and Knussen (2002 Pp26) “The scope of secondary data will often exceed what the individual might achieve on their own”, This quote explains that sometimes secondary research is better to a certain subject because someone else may know more about it and It can also help to make your research better, on the other hand secondary research is less reliable because its by someone else and not yourself so its best when using secondary research to know that the place you got it is a reliable source to use.

Qualitative research is research that is text based with the views of an audience that shows their opinions about the subject, however quantitative research is numerically based and shows the number of audiences for different things. Mcqeen and Knussen (2002 Pp28) “Qualitative research approaches explore and describe, explain and predict” this quote explains that when we use qualitative research we get a more detailed explanation and it can be supported with quantitative data.

The advantages of qualitative research are that you get to see what people actually think of something because they can give a detailed explanation about it, but this type of research also has disadvantages because people can lie about what they actually think and then the results cannot be exactly accurate. Some advantages of quantitative research are that you can get accurate results about the audiences of things, the disadvantages of this research is that you do not find out what people think of things and there is no detailed explanation involved because it is just numbers.

Some methods and sources of research are interviews, observations, web searches, literature searches, surveys and graphs/ charts. These methods come under different types of research that the creative media industries use, For example numerical based research methods like graphs/ charts are quantitative research methods that are primary results and things like literature searches is a qualitative research method.

There are three types of ways to interview people; these are structured, semi-structured and un-structured. A structured interview is when the interviewer has questions already prepared like they would in a job interview and they are looking for a certain answer. A semi- structured interview is when the interviewer has questions prepared but sometimes they change a question they were originally going to ask them, its less strict and will allow the interviewee to discuss their answers to the question more. An unstructured is an interviewing style that is basically just a conversation because the interviewer has no set questions to ask so they ask questions on their topic and hope for the interviewee to not go off subject and if they do the interviewer will try to get them back on topic. May.T (2002 Pp123)“These types of interviews are said to allow people to answer more on their own terms than the standardized interview permits” This quote tells us that when unstructured interviews are used it is more like a conversation than an interview because they can talk about their subject freely, sometimes this way of interviewing is more appropriate because there is less pressure on both the interviewer and the interviewee.  Pole and Lampard (2002 Pp139) “ In all interviews it is good practice to give the interviewee some idea of how much time you expect the interview will take.” This is important because it gives the interviewee a chance to see if they have enough time to finish the interview before it is started.

The purposes of research are Audience research, Marketing research and Production research. Audience research is aimed at different groups of people for example different age groups and genders. I looked at national readership survey this shows the classifications of the owner of a household’s income it is the social grade scale. People in class A are upper class people, this could be people like doctors, lawyers, accountants and people that are their own boss and run their own company. These people generally have quite a lot of money because they are the upper middle classes. People in class B are middle class families for example teachers and managers. The C1 class are lower middle class people that are young managers between the ages of 20 and 30. C2 families are the skilled working class like builders and hairdressers. Class D are the working class that are not poor and not rich but are skilled but not as skilled as higher groups. The people in class E would be people that have disabilities, single parents, criminals or pensioners. These people depend on welfare income and pensioners receive their money from the state because they retired from their job and without the state providing for them they wouldn’t have anything. The NRS is an example of Audience research.

Marketing research shows the audiences of things like TV, radio stations and business organisations it shows us what different companies offer us, BARB tells us what shows are most popular on TV in a week and shows a range of channels. It also shows the competition between different shows that are on at the same time, this shows which show people prefer to watch. BARB is only quantitative research because it cant tell us what people actually think of a show and can not be completely accurate because something may be showing on a TV but it may not be being watched, this is only for a full household as well therefor it is not accurate.

Call sheets are a form of production research they are used to organise a film creation, people use them to write down the times of when the parts of a film will be created, who will star in it, everyone involved in the making of it and who ever is directing it as well as the scenes and the storyline.

Bibliography

May. T (2002) Social Research. Open University Press, Buckingham

Pole and Lampard (2002) Practical Social Investigation. Qualitative and Quantative Methods in Social Research. Prentice Hall, London.

McQeen and Knussen (2002) Research Methods for Social Science, an introduction. Prentice Hall. London