The nature and purposes of research

The Nature and Purposes of Research

Primary research

Primary research is research that you collect independently, this can include interviews, surveys, questionnaires and much more. Such things as surveys and questionnaires can help you gain an understanding and the results might change the way you produce your production. For my primary I looked on Facebook and found a group with 12,620 members. On this group they ask questions and gain guidance on task such as how to polish shoes to how to apply for flying. This helped me focus on what aspects I should cover in my documentary.

  For my Ben and Jerry’s advert we created a survey to gather the thoughts and ratings from our fellow class mates, this is primary research.

Secondary research

Secondary research is looking at existing research instead as primary research; this can range from research subjects and experiments. You can also look at websites, newspapers, film archives and photo libraries. I did a lot of secondary research, for example I looked on the Air Cadets website (http://www.raf.mod.uk/aircadets/whatwedo/) to revise and add to my knowledge of activities that we execute. I also went to YouTube and looked at recruitment videos as my recruitment is one of my aims of the aims for my documentary. I found a lot of videos and was lucky enough to gain permission to use one of the videos.

Quantitative research

Quantitative research is about creating figures and  statistic. The larger number of people you ask the better because your statistics become more reliable. You can create such things as surveys or just ask people on a blog to gather quantitative research. Looking on the Facebook on figures that have watched videos is gathering information on what people who are cadets watch. You can also look at the view figures and ratings on the videos of the Air Training Corps on YouTube, as you can see bellow the video I was allowed to use has 3,918 views. This suggests that there is a large audience on YouTube watching videos about the ATC.

Qualitative research

Qualitative research is a primary exploratory research, it can be applied to help understand and spotting reasons, motivation and opinions. It can help unearth trends in thought and options. Qualitative research is all about the asking people for their view and opinions in a certain way so you can makes statistics and numbers. For the Ben and Jerry’s advert that I made we created a survey to gain views, bellow you can see that instead of a simple yes or no found in quantitative, we ask more for their opinion and views.

Data gathering agencies

Data gathering agencies collect data for people, for example, BARB collect television viewing figures for broadcasters and for the advertising industry. There is also Box Office Mojo, which I used heavily for my film studies last year. Box Office Mojo is more for the film industry and gathers viewing figures and also the finical figures, like how much money they have made in the first week of screening.

  Audience and Market research

Audience and market research is looking into who you will be aiming your product at and learning everything about them. For example, using demographics is grouping people and placing them in a market segment, they involve age bands, social class and gender. You really need to define who you are targeting, for my documentary I decided to aim it at the ages between (13-18).You also need to look into your competition and how they are going about advertising and who they are targeting. For my ATC documentary I could look at Army Cadet Force media and see how much interest they gain. You need to make sure that you place your advertising in the right place and at the right time so your primary audience can see it, I’m going to place it on the Facebook group that I mentioned earlier and on my squadrons Facebook page. Looking on the Facebook pages I could see that the audience of the group was young, around the age on cadets (13-20). You can find what gains large numbers of audiences on BARB.

Production research

Being a cadet I was lucky enough to film on the squadron with on cost, and gained permission by emailing my media officer, bellow you can see some recce shots that I took at squadron. My filming locations were very limited because I was lucky enough to gain permission to use footage from a recruitment video for a fellow ATC squadron which I contacted. Personnel wise it was just I, the talent I used were my friends that volunteered so I didn't have to pay any money. The equipment used was rented from the college AV room, and all editing took place on the colleges Premier Pro software.

Media research company

Bellow you can see a media research company that can look into audience measurements and much more.

http://www.kantarmedia.co.uk/