1 Christopher O’Neill

Research techniques for the creative Media Industries

Research AssignmentChristopher O’NeillND semester 1- 2014/15

2 Christopher O’Neill

Contents page

1. Quantitative Research (page 3-5)

2. Qualitative research (page 5-6)

3. Methods of research (primary/secondary research) (page 6-8)

4. Purpose of research (audience) (page 8-9)

5. Purpose of research (market) (page8-9)

6. My research (page 10)

7. Conclusion (page 10)

3 Christopher O’Neill

Quantitative Research

Quantitative research is about gaining peoples honest opinions by asking them specific questions in order to gain hard facts and statistics, it’s important that the survey has a large amount of people in order to make sure that the people are a representable sample of your target market. These surveys are usually done by businesses or firms that are trying to improve their product.

Source: http://www.marketingdonut.co.uk/

Examples of Quantitative research

Programme ratings: this is a great way to find out the amount of people who watch a particular show.

4 Christopher O’Neill

www.barb.co.uk

Box office: websites such as box office mojo would count the amount of tickets a particular movie has sold in all the cinemas it has been shown, then they would come up with the amount of money the film made.

www.boxofficemojo.com

Readership circulation figures

This would be a great way to find out what magazine or newspaper is the most popular, this would be very similar to box office.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/

5 Christopher O’Neill

Qualitative research

Qualitative research is whenever you take the figures and research and

try and understand it.

Examples of qualitative research

Game and film reviews: This along with film reviews is whenever a person plays or watches a videogame or movie and then writes a analysis of it, this is useful because it helps the reader decided with all this information if this movie or video game is worth their time.

www.rottentomatoes.com

6 Christopher O’Neill

www.gamespot.com

Methods and sources of research

Primary Research: This is the information that you have collected yourself by interviewing people, this makes the research much more accurate and reliable than secondary sources. Good examples of primary sources would be questionnaires that you can be done on a computer or on paper, interviews that you do, or surveys.Advantages:

Reliable source since it’s yourself. Person doing the survey will find it easier to find exactly what they

want in a survey.Disadvantages:

Resources of person doing research may be limited.

7 Christopher O’Neill

http://www.gopixpic.com/

Secondary ResearchThis is research that has already been collected as primary researched by somebody else, it is known as dark research because it has already been collected.Examples of Secondary research would be ratings, circulation figures and journals. Advantages:

Research already done. High figures of people taking part that you may be unable to

acquire if you did it yourself. Disadvantages:

Research may be unreliable.

8 Christopher O’Neill

www.barb.com

The Purpose Of Research

Consumer opinions: To get a better understanding as to why a certain person buys a particular product, what their fought o a certain service, by doing this the person doing the survey may come to a better understanding how to improve their product and services.

Competition: Competition is the best thing for consumers because it makes people different business give better deals, getting a better understanding of what the consumer wants will lead to making better business decisions leading to an increase of revenue over your competitor.

Audience awareness: You want to get a good insight into want your intended audience wants, and there is no better way of doing that than doing research, the Cholmcille heritage centre wanted us to create a promotional video about

Demographics: Demographics are a good way of understanding what a particular group of people’s buying habits is in order to improve your services or product; these readings would usually come in the form of pie charts.

Audience research: This is how you research your target audience using different types of audience research.

Advertising placement: This would be the research someone would do to find an ideal place to put an advertising so it’s target audience see’s it, this is very important as if you don’t place it in the ideal place it’s going to have a impact on sales.

9 Christopher O’Neill

Consumer analysis: This would be the study of different groups, organizations, or people and how they use certain services and products. This is to try and understand what is the best way to promote your product to it’s intended audience.

Audience profiling: This is the economic and social characteristic of your target audience. Finding out their disposable income, social status and preferred leisure activities are help in improving the product for them.

Product Market: Finding out what type of market your product will be sold by businesses is very useful.

Market research: this will be useful in finding out your competitor’s trends, and by leaning those you can get one over them by countering with something better.

http://aishasalimmediaa2.blogspot.co.uk/

http://nuclear-news.net/2011/09/16/

My Research

10 Christopher O’Neill

For my social action project we chose 2 people who were heavily involved with the redevelopment of the building and getting the Cholmcille heritage centre off the ground.

Grainne McCafferty : Grainne is the Chairperson of the Aras Cholmcille Trust, she was one of the main people to get the centre up and running, we have been fortunate to get an interview with her before her holiday, this interview is important as she as a lot of insight into the building and the centre.

Questions we asked: Tell us about yourself, and your interest of the significance of

culture and heritage? How did the centre develop? Your involvement with the centre Can you tell us about the history of the building Does the centre need more volunteers? Does the centre need ore promotion? How was the project funded? Why is Saint Columba so significant? What are your hopes and dreams for the future?

There was a few questions added in by the interviewer throughout the interview

Ivor Doherty : Ivor is a historian and had a good insight into the building, after we did Grainne’s interview we realized it was quite long, so we decided to only focus on the building’s history for Ivor.

Questions we asked: What is the history of the building? What was the building before it became the heritage centre? Can you tell us about the transition of the building? What are your hopes for the future?

Research Evaluation

11 Christopher O’Neill

Research processThe more time that you spend on research, the better the product that you are

working on will turn out. The 3 interviews that I did required a lot of research so that I would be able to conduct the most informative interview possible.

To show all my research in a easy and convenient way, I designed my own weebly page, which shows all of the events that I attended, all of the research I

did for my tutors, and all of the interviews that I conducted, for my social action project my team designed a website to show of our edited work and all of our

Biographical ProfileIn terms of research this was probably the easiest as I was doing a video about

myself, the paired interview required some thought as to how I was going to structure the interview, the biographical profile required a lot of planning as to

what I was going to show about me.

Social action projectFor my social action I provided a PowerPoint on my hero, I main source of

research for this project was the Internet.

I also provided a social action video that my class reviewed and gave formal feedback on my weebly.

This required a lot of research in order to get the best possible interviews; we did some research into the background into the 2 people we were going to

interview and structured the questions around what their speciality subject was, for example, Ivor was a historian so we made sure that the questions we asked

him were based around the history of the centre.The strengths of research for this project were we were able to get the very best interview possible from both Grainne and Ivor, we understood who our target

audience were thanks to the research that we did.

The weakness was that we didn’t have the strongest understanding of the building.

On the next page is a pasted document. It is an example of the research I did for the interview with Grainne McCafferty.

This task was very useful as the research techniques that I did research into were very useful for the Cholmcille social action project because we knew what

12 Christopher O’Neill

the people there wanted from us, this type of research is very important for anyone who wants to succeed in any business venture.

Research techniques assignment

13 Christopher O’Neill

This was great for understanding different techniques that I can use in the future. By researching this I was able to find examples of both good and bad interviews.

Above is an example of some of the research that I did to understand research techniques, different techniques are useful depending on what you are trying to achieve, for example, combative interviews are good for serious interviews over

serious subject matters, they would be a lot less light hearted in tone.

14 Christopher O’Neill

For the research into the techniques in the creative media industries I gave examples of charts and diagrams to back up my research.

For my sources I used Moodle resources, the assignment briefs, and used the library to access the recommended reading list.

For the weaknesses I could have found many better interviews to use as examples, I would have researched more into the research techniques. And I

used extended primary resources for social action.