Task 1 - unit 2, unit 3 & unit 22By Suela Elezi

Quantitative research Quantitative research is the data that is in numerical form such as statistics and percentages. It is hard information that the researcher transfer as numerical data and it is usually displayed in graphs and tallies.Quantitative research is collected through measuring data and the data is analysed through numerical comparisons and statistical inferences. This becomes useful because, when a magazine company wants to know how much more popular or unpopular a competing magazine is, because the research is statistically reliable. For example a magazine such as ‘OK’ will want to know how well their competitors are doing such as ‘Hello’.

Examples of quantitative research are, questionnaires, surveys and polls.

A film producer would need to create questionnaires that he would hand out to people to

conduct information about what movies they like.

A question that is used in quantitative research could be,

‘Do you like to watch horror movies?’

Yes or No

Advantage Disadvantage

1. It allows the researcher to measure and analyse data.2. The research can be used to test hypotheses in experiments

because of its ability to measure data using statistics.

1. It is difficult and expensive and requires a lot of time to perform.2. It required extensive statistical analysis, which can be difficult to

collect.

Qualitative research Qualitative research is research that requires a more in-depth response, it allows you to ask personal question and collect more data on people. Qualitative research deals with description and data can be observed but not measured.

This is best used in TV shows when they get the personal response from viewers, It allows them to find out about how some people feel about a certain story line and whether they think it will be appropriate.

Examples of qualitative research are, diary accounts, open-ended questionnaires, unstructured interviews and unstructured observations.

A TV producer would conduct data from people by asking a question like … ‘ Why do you like the TV programme Eastenders?’

Also, question that could be used in a qualitative research is … ‘Why do you like to watch horror movies?’

Advantage Disadvantage

1. It enables more complex aspects of a person’s experience to be studied.

2. There are fewer restrictions or assumptions are placed on the data to be collected.

3. Not everything can be quantified, or quantified easily, individuals can be studied in more depth.

1. It is more difficult to determine the validity and reliability of linguistic data.

2. There is more subjectivity involved in analysing the data which leads to time consuming..

Methods of research There are numerous of methods of research such as, quantitative research, qualitative research, primary research and secondary research.

Primary research is new research, carried out to answer specific issues or questions. It can involve questionnaires, surveys or interviews with individuals or small groups. Primary research is used to create first hand question that can be used to gather information from others.

For media purpose, a film producer may use primary research to ask people what type of genre movies they like. Also, a web designer could hand out surveys to ask people what colour scheme they would like and this would help the web designer make his website eye catchy and has used the people’s views.

Advantage Disadvantage

1. The information the researcher has collected and worked with personally.

2. It relates directly to that person's research or study.

1. There are huge costs involved in gathering information.2. It consumes a lot of time since a researcher has to

prepare for the study, gather details, and process the information into coherent and logical results.

Methods of research

Secondary research makes use of information previously researched by another person for other purposes and publicly available. An example of secondary research used for a media purpose could be a video gamer could search what is the most popular game that people play. Or a film producer could look at another producer’s results on favorite sub genres compared to their results.

Advantage Disadvantage

1. It usually time and cost required to collect secondary data is less than efforts required to collect primary data. Data is available freely or at far lesser cost through secondary sources.

2. The data collected by governments and other institutes is usually very extensive and covers a large spectrum of issues. A person can filter that data and consider only parts which they are targeting.

3. From secondary data one can form hypotheses and can evaluate the cost and efforts required to conduct own surveys.

1. The dependent on someone else's efforts and this may not be reliable information.

2. It will not get answers to their specific issues through this data directly and one needs to 'mine' further into it to get relevant information.

3. Some of the secondary sources might have copyrighted their information and using them without permission can lead to various legal complications.

Purpose of research Media companies use research to improve the quality of their media product by researching their rivals and figuring out how they can make their product better than the others (through market research). By researching their target audience and finding out how they can make their product suitable as possible for them (through audience research) and researching what they will need to make and distribute their product so they can be completely prepared and organised (production research). They use research to make sure their product is appealing to their consumers by using questionnaires, interviews, reviews and focus groups to find out more of the people’s views. Media companies also use research to increase their chances of making a good profit from their media product by finding out what they will need, how much it will all cost and estimating how much money they could make from it.

For media purpose, there are three main factors that they follow which are...1. Audience 2. Production 3. Marketing

Market research and production research are two types of research used in media industry.

Market research is the action or activity of gathering information about consumers needs and preferences in order to compete with other products within the market. Knowing who your target market are is very important as it will help you compete and stay on top of the media industry.

Production research is figuring out everything you will need and how much it will cost and how you will get the information. In order to target the audience, you will need to make sure that your product is viable and achievable. This can be done by looking at how similar products have been distributed and made, how much it will cost the company to do so and how much money they made from it to get a general idea of how much money you will spend and make with your product.

Purpose of research Audience is used to find out what group people belong in. For example, if a person is in the social class, skilled working class or in the upper middle class. This can help classify people into groups so the person collecting research will know roughly how much a person is willing to buy a product. Group C1 which is lower middle or D which is working people. In a media scenario, if a video game producer was releasing a new video game, he would need to conduct information from the audience by asking them question of how much they can spend on a video game. He could use qualitative research as this will allow more information to be gathered rather than just statistics which will not give him much detail from what the customers will want.

Audience is an important factor when gathering research because in a media scenario, if a film producer wants to release his movie, he will need to make sure that there are no other movies releasing on similar days as people may want to go and watch the other movie. Also, he will need to make sure that people can afford to go to the cinema and pay for the porcie to watch the movie.

Demographic is grouping people on a physical criteria such as, age, gender, ethnicity, locale, economic status, income levels and employment. This is segmenting the audience which shows what group people belong in such as, skilled working class, lower middle class, upper middle and upper class. Psychographic is the study of classifying and grouping people based on their opinions, ideas, beliefs and attitudes.

This is an image is table that shows the different social classes that different people belong into as they have different economic status or income levels.

Purpose of research Production is for asking yourself questions such as, is making the product worth it? Is the product already created by another person? And it is also looking at the process of manufacturing the product; will making the product cost more than making profit from it. A film producer could use primary research to find out if other movies are releasing on similar or later days that will be out in the cinema, so the film producer should decide on what days they should release their music video as people may go and watch the other big hit movie and only a few people may watch their movie.

The purpose of using production is to make sure that a film producer makes sure that his movie will be filmed in a cinema that most people go to so there will be more viewers. Another point, is that the producer needs to make sure that during production, there needs to be equipment and catsa that will contribute in making the video that will be played in the cinema, also, during post-production, the producer will need to make sure that angles he has used for editing, are smoothly so that the scenes in the video are superior and make the viewers feel more involved in the scenes.

Purpose of research Marketing is identifying the competition and advertising. For competition, it makes the owner of the product search for rivals that are already existing and make sure that the competition will not effect the owner and its product and make sure that they can beat the other competition by making their product better than the others. Whereas advertising is using research to find out if there are similar products as your product and use advertising to gather viewers. For example, if a move was created and aimed for 16 to 8 year olds, they will use social media to promote their movie because most teenagers use social media daily and they will be able to get information about the movie through social media such as, twitter, instagram, facebook or snapchat. On the other hand, if a film producer was going to release a movie that was aged for people around their 40s, they could promote the movie in newspaper or magazine as the older generation are use to reading papers and not really familiar with modern technology.

Market research is necessary for when gathering information for media purpose because it will allow producers to get knowledge from people on what they like in movies and what the producer will need to do to get more viewers to watch the movie.

The three diagrams below, show that different types of topics are divided into tables to show what the public prefer. For example the graph of ‘R&B/POP ARTISTS’ shows that people have different opinions on what type of artists they listen to. You can see that ‘One Direction’ have the most viewers as the number on the graph is 36%, which is the highest. But, the 9% shows that the artists Beyoncé, is listened the least.