The Nature and Purpose of Research in the Creative Media Industry

The Nature and Purposes of Research in the Creative Media Industries

Research is a completely vital step in the creation and development of any media production large or small, without the research you would be left two slices of bread short of a sandwich and well you can see where this is going. Put simply research is the core of your foundations and so must be focused on and paid attention to regardless of how tedious it can be; a mistake here could shift the viability of your production completely.

(If we wished to find out about the history of film we could do so through sites such as wikipedia, since all of this data was sourced from other places the type of research we would be doing here would be secondary)

Research comes in multiple forms and so it is vital that you can differentiate between them in order to become efficient and accurate with your findings:

• The first type of research you should do is known as Secondary research, now this sounds incorrect but in fact it makes perfect sense once you have the term defined. Secondary research is when you look at existing facts and figures from websites, papers or national archives that are relevant to the production you are undertaking in order to discover how things work and ultimately if they work; essentially it is researching research. An efficient example of mining data on a large scale is data gathering agencies for example the British Audience Research Board (BARB). These agencies do the boring work so you don’t have to, well at least not to the same scale. BARB analyses and organise the data collected from hundreds of television channels nationwide to collect millions of ratings. main purpose is to gather data about audiences for other companies and people to use and benefit from. I personally gathered my secondary data from:
  https://www.franchisehelp.com/industry-reports/fitness-industry-report/ http://www.teamusa.org/USA-Weightlifting/Weightlifting101/History-of-Weightliftinghttp://www.statisticbrain.com/gym-membership-statistics/  

• The second type of research is known as -you guessed it- Primary research! Now Primary research is not always vital to the creation of a viable product but it is generally speaking advisable. Primary research comes from primary sources (first hand) and that means you have to do your own independent research through questionnaires or interviews in the pursuit of finding out things that tie in to your specific detailing. The methods we used were free survey websites and distributing them online; an issue of this was we were generally connecting to peers and in doing so we are unable to discover the wider spectrum of opinions but for the sake of this project it was more of a practise for future reference than actual decision making and so was fine. In order to gather our secondary research we used the site survey monkey since it allowed us to quickly create and distribute our questionnaire for free.

We reach another couple of forks in the road within our existing findings and again it boils down to finding more varied and specific examples. This is where we get the terms Qualitative (qualities) and Quantitative (quantities) the difference being with quantitative we place a numerical value towards the thing we are looking for, for example the amounts of people that enjoyed X over Y And with qualitative we are looking at the types of people that enjoyed X over Y. Quantitative methodology is much easier to obtain and faster to plot and explain on charts and graphs, the reason it is easier to work with is when only one word answers are asked and answered. Qualitative data is much more time consuming but it reflects the audience with much more depth and understanding and since it all boils down to target audience then nine times out of ten qualitative is better at that than quantitative; however since research takes longer for the person being questioned we find that they instantly become less likely to want to partake in the survey and actually sometimes qualitative methodology is completely irrelevant to the situation. 

After the audience researching comes production research, this is in order to see how financially viable the production is and cover all aspects such as equipment costs and actually finding the funds in the first place for the plans to come to fruition.

Reliability

There is a rule that is without doubt true and that rule is what I like to refer to as the four R’s. The equation goes something like: Research+Repeating=Reliable Results and it without doubt holds true. Reliability surrounds itself with the idea of accuracy and true knowledge of how something truly is after being tried and tested. If you get enough results then the outliers in qualitative methodology for example will be nullified. This happened with my surveys for which we allowed a text box for people to be able to express specifics and friends of mine would put jokes that would give me a small laugh but were ultimately useless to me. Also worth noting are people are likely to either conform to the general populous or throw me answers they think I need to hear which again throws the scales off balance and destroy the point in the survey in the first place; however if your survey can reach globally and be accessed by people of all ages and backgrounds you will be provided with the ultimate result since you will have the purest idea of what it is you are asking and you will obtain the answers with maximum reliability, the only issue being crunching the numbers but in high volumes computers can be used to interpret and sort your findings.

Validity

Validity ultimately boils down to how relevant your results are to the question you are answering. It's fine having repeated a test hundreds of times until you get reliable results but if the results have no correlation towards what it is you are looking for then the data is invalid and therefore is useless for what you want it for. To ensure validity you must have a clear idea of what it is you are looking for the answer to and also make sure that your questions are written correctly and are both understandable and interpretable in the form of relateable data.

Representativeness

Representativeness is about ensuring that the group of people tested were representative of the target demographic. Ways this can be explained as well as done is using this example: If there are a group of 30 people all aged 18, there are 17 boys and 13 girls, 5 of the boys are from single parent families and 7 of the girls are from single parent families. In order to get a representative idea of what this group of people think we must have an equal number of boys and girls as well as girls and boys from single parent families. So the sample group we would be testing would be made up of 5 boys and 5 girls from single parent families and 5 boys and 5 girls whos parents were still together. from a group of 30 we have selected 20 to be tested since this will give the most equal number of each type person and so it is representative of each of the groups and eaily comparable. In our questionnaire we made sure that we distributed it to both an equal amount of females as males however we ended up with more boys answering since not everyone that was sent the link completed the survey. Regardless we gathered a fairly representative sample with a good mixture of both sexes and so I personally think our survey was reliable, valid and representative.

 Generalisability

Generalisability is all about how applicable certain data is to studies other than the one being currently tested. For example a question of ours was 'If you do not go to the gym, why?' although it's fairly relevant to what we wanted to find out the findings could also be applied to another questionnaire about fitness. Since the focus of our questionnaire was one of documentary content rather than looking for fitness data although it was asking about their reasons for not getting involved in fitness it was more to do with seeing what the type of people that were interested in our production were. An example of one of our questions that wouldn't be generalisable would be our question about age since although it gives an idea of age, it would be irrelevant unless you were able to have them answer the rest of the secondary questionaire because you would have nothing to compare it to and it would produce invalid findings.

Market Research

Market Research is used to discover and test how viable a new product would be should it be released on todays shelves. The types of things you would be expected to find out about is what is it your customers look for in the type of product you are making and the way to do this is by looking at existing products similar to yours, working out the flaws and building on the successful elements in order to create something that is better than the rest and is very much a viable product.