The nature and purposes of research in the creative media industries

  Definitions 

Primary research - Primary research is the research that you do yourself for example if you interview someone you are doing primary research about them as you are finding it out yourself and not finding information from anyone else. One time I have used primary research is at the beginning of this course when I made some questionnaires and sent them to people and put them on social media so I could get the results. I made 3 different questionnaires and these where based on Corona, Social media and lockdown. This was all to see how the lockdown restrictions was affecting others  https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/YFFTTM8 . Primary research is also used in the professional industry for example when I was in high school the BBC come in to speak to the years that was in high school, they presented during the lesson and they where explaining everything they where doing when working there and what it was like working for them. At the end of the lesson they have out a questionnaire asking us questions like did we watch BBC? Did we watch the news? If we wanted to watch something what would we normally go towards? Finding it better for them to widen their audience so they would get more viewers in the future. 

Secondary research-

Secondary research is what other people have the found things out and your learning from them. There are many ways that you can do secondary research for example books, internet, songs etc. One way I have used secondary research is in my research dossier, this is because I had to research some pictures, who the director was and had to find some quotes from an interview about how they made that movie. The reason this is secondary research is because I watched someone else do the interview, if I had done it myself then it would have been primary. One way I have had to use secondary research is actually for the word below, I wasn't to sure what it meant so I had to look it up. This is secondary research as I am looking at something else someone has already looked up for us. Another time I used secondary research was when I was going through screen plays with my teacher in class, we sat down as a class and looked at different scripts to see the way that they are laid out. The image to the left is one of the scripts I looked at when looking at the positioning and layout. When doing secondary research there is pros and cons with doing this. The pros of using secondary research is it is always going to be there, if you need to look at some answers you can just ask a question to google and it will come up with the answer because other people have researched it. The cons about this is if you don't have any internet it could be a bit of a struggle and also the information that you are wanting also isn't going to be definite on there so it may cause you to struggle when using secondary research. If you are also watching a video of an interview then they may not ask the questions you need the answer to so it could be more time consuming.  

Quantitative research- Quantitative research is the amount of research you do It is used to quantify attitudes, opinions, behavior's, and other defined variables. This methods include forms of surveys, this can be online, paper, mobile or kiosk surveys. It can also include face-to-face interviews, telephone interviews, longitudinal studios, website interceptors, online polls and systematic observations. An example for this is in my survey linked above one of the questions I asked was the gender, age and occupation this is needed when doing surveys and doing questionnaires. 

Qualitive research - This means when you collect a lot of information, this can be analyzing data, text video or audio. this will be able to help understand concepts, opinions or experiences. it is used to gather in depth insights into a problem or generate new ideas for research. When talking about qualitative research there is a number of different types and they are grounded theory, ethnographic, narrative research, historical, case studies and phenomenology. 

The image above shows the reviews from Spiderman Far From Home. It shows how many people have put their opinions there, it also just shows just how many people have voted, it is clear for us to see most people have voted for the movie for it to be 5 starts and the least people have voted for 2 starts. This is an example of qualitive research because a number of people was asked the same and we have been able to see what the most popular answer is. 

Market / audience research- Market / audience research is about answering a range of business questions, such as to find out what interests them, who influences them, what problems they have, what they think of existing products or how they feel about branding and service. for example a shop inspector going into Greggs and asking what is sold a lot more, what's popular, what's not popular, why they think it isn't etc. They can also ask if a product is not doing well they can question why your still making them even though people are not buying them as much. 

Production research - Production research is to gather information on the content of production related issues. The methods of production research could be secondary research for example through books and setting up focus groups to gather people's opinions.