The nature and purposes of research in the creative media industries

Primary research is new information that you have found and collected yourself. This can include surveys, focus groups and interviews. I did a questionnaire to find out about my idea and some of the questions I might ask in my documentary. I started by asking about the interest in my idea as it can be a boring topic to talk about, however the feedback came back positive so I carried on with the idea. I found questions that I could ask in the documentary and put them on the questionnaire as I wanted mix of responses for each question in the documentary and if the answers came back similar I wouldn't ask that question in the documentary, some I decided to use based on the questionnaire.
In the professional industry they would do something similar to find out what works well and what doesn't they would either do what i did and do a questionnaire or would do a focus group and would do these to get the public's feedback on their idea.  

Secondary research is old information that someone else found and you use to get a better understanding on the topic. There are many ways of getting secondary research such as Books, journals, reference-based books and directories, periodicals, newspapers, film archives, photo libraries, worldwide web, searching internet forums, I got a few different types of secondary research such as reports, news reports and documentary's. I used this to get a better understanding of my topic so i could ask relevant questions to try and get a new spin on the topic.

Quantitative research is information on figures that you use as research to find out if your topic is popular or not. A few examples of quantitative research are programme ratings, readership circulation figures, hits on a website, box office figures, sales of CD's and DVDs. I didn't need to use this type of research as I already had primary research telling that people would be interested so I didn't need to look figures.

Qualitative research is information that is by an individual essentially reviewing a product/topic and giving their views and opinions on it. A few examples are film reviews, game reviews, fanzine website, responses to news coverage, discussion. I didn’t use much of this as I didn’t think it was necessary as I didn’t need to know if it was controversial because politics is always controversial. I used it a little bit to find out if this topic is talked about enough to make a documentary and it was but i didn’t do enough research to note it on my research page.

   

Data gathering agencies have the purpose of taking information on media and displaying it to the public. They give information on how popular the certain media is and if it worth looking at.  The first example of this that I know is BARB figure which is a collection of data showing how many people are watching a TV channel at all times. This is helpful as you might want to look at a time to put your advert on a channel or use it to find out if a topic you are planning on using for your own project is getting lots of views. The second example is IMDB which is a website that reviews movies and TV shows and also gives you a rating on how good it is. This website gives you data on how popular all movies and TV show are.

Audience and market research is just essentially asking the public for feedback on the product you are planning to make and make changes based on the feedback. This could be done in many ways such as questionnaires, focus groups and researching your demographic and geographic. I used a questionnaire to get a good idea of what my audience is and researched the topic in depth to get the right questions for my documentary. I didn't do much as i already knew what my target audience was going to be and i started for there.   

Production research is the research that is done just before the production starts which includes location research and scouting, Personnel recruiting and finance research. This is a crucial part of a production as this what all of the filming relies on, if you get the locations wrong you could ruin the whole production. I used location recces to essentially scout the location of my choice to see if it would work. I didn't use no personnel i did it all myself however i had to get people to be in the production so i planed ahead to get people to act in the production.