Audience ResearchToday we read an interesting article which gave us some

advice on how to get audience research. As this something that has not thoroughly been portrayed in my blog, I found

this very useful as to how we are going to attract and appeal to our target audience. As a group we thought of some

different ideas as to how we are going to get some feedback from our target audience on our film as well as advertising

our film.

Intro into Qualitative research• “Qualitative research methods attempt to classify

diverse opinions or behaviours into established categories (Diamond 1999, 22)”

• “It consists of a set of interpretive, material practices that transform the world into a series representations including field notes, interviews, conservations, photographs, recordings, and memos to the self (Denzin and Lincoln 2005, 3)”

• Qualitative research involves many different methods of getting information. These are split up into various different methods:

• Interviews face-to-face unstructured, semi-structured or structured interviews

telephone interviews

online interviews

mail interviews

focus group discussions• Observation

Unobtrusive observation – not getting in the way of the participant whether they know you are observing or not.

Participant observation – the participant is clearly aware that they are being observed.

• Personal meaning mapping• Mobile phones.Q

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Interviews

• The interviewer is a person, historically and contextually located, carrying, unavoidable conscious and unconscious motives, desires, feelings and biases (Sheurich 1995, 241) [ethical problems]

• Furthermore, the setting in which the interview takes place, the language and culture of the respondents, the ways in which an interviewer presents him/herself and the necessity to gain trust effect the outcome of the interview.

How will we research?

As a group after reading the article we had to think about how we would research information on our target audience for our own documentary. We drew up these few ideas:

• Focus groups – pitch to an audience of various different people our different ideas and gather their thoughts on what we could do with our documentary.

• Social networking (using Twitter and Facebook) – post on social networking sites questions for friends and followers to answer to get an idea what various different people are into or notice in advertisements. Find out their favourite advertisements and why they appeal to them. Can we incorporate this into our own advertising campaign for out documentary?

• Audience profiling.