Nature and Purposes of Research

Primary research is data that you have conducted and collected yourself, examples of this are questionnaires and focus groups. These are two of the most common ways of getting primary research. For my research I conducted a questionnaire and asked random participants to fill it out. I got 10 responses and I also posted the questionnaire on Facebook and I was able to get another 5 replies from the social media. Film companies would normally hire research agencies to carry out this research for them however focus groups etc are also made so they can find out more about the audience and what they think about the film, from my research I was able to find out basic information about the participants such as age, gender and what they thought of the film I was re marketing. I could have also conducted self generated research which is where you video something yourself like an interview with a member from the public and you then look through the footage. I could have filmed and interviewed the participants however due to time I wasn't able to but people also do not like a camera in their face. You can also use self generated research, this is where I would go and film some footage and then later analyse it myself. the clue is in the title when its called 'self generated' it means you done all the primary research yourself and didn't use anyone elses data/research. This doesn't just have to be films it can be interviews or anything.

Secondary research is research you haven't conducted yourself, secondary research can come from book, Internet reviews and even government statistics. Again film companies would normally hire research agencies to find out all this information as the stored information is easier to find and research agencies specialise in finding information about your target audience. The only secondary research that I conducted was looking at the film views off 'Rotten Tomatos' and also going on Box Office Mojo and IMDB to find out how much the film 'Funny People' cost to make and how much of its production budget cost to make.

Quantitative data is numerical data which is gathered mostly by closed answer questionnaires, this is a good way of getting a lot of data fast to get quick results that can be shown in graphs and tables. Data like this is box office figures and hits on a website. The Quantitative I gathered was from Box office mojo and IMDB to gather the information about the film.

Qualitative data is the other type of data. This type of data is to get opinions and more in depth answers from the audience, an example is 'Did you like this film? and why?' this would then make the audience give an opinion on why they liked/disliked the film. Data like this is things such as film reviews and responses to an advert. This data isn't a fact as its an opinion unlike quantitative data. I found qualitative data by asking questions in my questionnaire that made the participant give an opinion, and also the reviews I used from rotten tomatoes.

Data gathering agencies are agencies which can be hired to conduct/find data to help find out more about a certain target audience. They can made focus groups to find data or even just search out government statistics. They can find out the age, gender and even what job the audience has. Some examples of these agencies are Broadcasters Audience Research Board (BARB) or Radio Joint Audience Research Ltd (RAJAR). BARB is the official source of television viewing figures in the UK, in other words they measure how many people watch certain TV programmes. They commision specialist research companies to to collect data that represent the television viewing behaviour of the UK's 26 million households. I used IMDB and Box Office Mojo which are simular to these companies, they give information about films sich as production budgets what they made at the box office and just general reviews.

To get ahead of your competition you would need to do market and audience research. For audience research you would look at demographics of the audience. This is where you find out what they work as, what age they are, gender, where they live etc. Market research is crucial if you want to have a successful box office hit. For this you would find out what films are coming out the week you are preparing to release your film on also what time of the year can also be a good selling point, you would release a comedy very late in the year and call it 'the best comedy of the year' and most people will believe this quote as they are most likely not going to be able to remember every comedy film they watched that year. These two sectors of research can give you a huge advantage over all your competitors. I only done a small amount of market/audience research for my project, I found out that the week that Funny People was released no other comedy films were being released for at least another 2 weeks. This is a very good tactical move from the film makers and advertising company as if people want to see a comedy that is the only on that is being shown so people will watch it.

Production research this is another very important type of research this is where you look at things such as content, placement in the media and locations etc. These can help you again get an advantage over your competition as if you have the right media placement more people are going to see the advertising and there for more people are going to go and watch and tell their friends about the film. For my project we didn't do any of this apart from pick what the perfect location would be and if we needed to spend any money on travel and props, however the college was able to provide us with the location and props we needed. Of course the production research has to be reliable to make it reliable you can hand out hundreds of questionnaires and have more than one focus groups. The more questionnaires the more reliable your results become. From these results you can see what people think of the movie poster or what they think the movie is about so the movie marketing is able to make changes if they are needed. I got 10 paper responses from people however some of the respondents didn't take the questionnaire seriously and I did get some silly comments etc, I also posted my questionnaire on Facebook and I got 5 responses so in total I had 15 responses. I was able to learn from the questionnaire that people found that the original movie poster was boring and bland and that it didn't look like a movie it looked more like a TV drama comedy like The Big Bang Theory and people only knew it was a comedy because of the stars that were on the poster (Adam Sandler, Seth Rogan etc). I feel with some of the questionnaire they were very rushed although I did have very simple yes or no answers on there I also asked them why they thought that and the answers were very short, I also feel with the some of the answers were answered so they were what I wanted and not what they actually thought. As I didn't have that many participants I don't think they can represent the population as again most of them were the same age, however I was able to generalise the answers. All in all, people liked my poster more than the original.

When you finally have all of your research there are 4 things you need to think about, these are validity, reliability, representativeness and generalisabilty. We have representativeness, there is where you have to see that your research as a whole is actually aimed and tells the truth about the people you surveyed. For example if I was to ask my fellow students whether they like horror and 75% of then said they did, I then couldn't say that 75% of the UK like horror films as this is false information. This also links to generalisability as you cannot generalise the groups of people you have collected research from. If you researched students you would have to state that the results were taken from students responses to questions, again you couldn't just say that 75% of people in the UK like horror it would have to clearly state that 75% students in a class like horror. Reliability is also a huge point you need to look out for when looking at your results. Is it reliable? Have people actually given their true response and not just copied their friends to fit in? For example if a person question was asked on a questionnaire or in a focus group people may say a response that fits in with social norm and not actually what their personal response is this can make your data unreliable. If you were to do a very personal 1 to 1 interview you would get a better response giving your research and results more reliability. Lastly we have validity, validity is whether what your results show is actually good at showing the point you're trying to prove. If you ask people whether they're Christians however you ask them the question if they go to church assuming that all Christians will go to church which isn't true thus making your results invalid. Always make sure your questions will actually allow your results to apply to your research.