Unit 3.1-Research Methods Assignment

Primary research

Research methods are needed to back up theories or statements. Without research, you have no proof and therefore no one will believe or agree with your theory/statement. The research methods that will help with this are primary, secondary, qualitative and quantitative.

Primary research is basically, your research. It could be an interview, observations or even a questionnaire. With primary research you have more control. In an interview you could ask someone to elaborate on his or her answers, this would give us more information that we need. However, if the interviewee isn’t prepared to elaborate or is tense, they will get confused and muddled-up. Less information will come from this.

In an interview, if you are informal you will get the interviewee to feel more relaxed, this minimises the chances of them getting muddled-up. If you are formal, you will make the interviewee feel more nervous thus making it harder to get the needed information out of them. This will get more information because they will be more relaxed and wouldn’t be ‘fake’ by giving false information.

A structured interview is more specific. These are basically open/closed questions. If you want reliable and specific answers to find the information you are after then a simple yes or no answer is best. A semi-structured interview though is more formal. You would ask additional questions, then ask questions relating to their answer.

Observations are another primary method. These could be over a short or long period of time. They are very reliable and less expensive, if they work. They might not work though because people may feel uncomfortable and nervous being watched. This would affect their behaviour; they would become ‘fake’ and act differently, the way they think you want them to act.

Questionnaires are effective if you want specific answers. You could also separate them into groups by asking questioning whether they are male/female or ask their age. However, if they don’t understand a question you are unable to rephrase it or explain it, so they will skip it and you lose information. They may also feel judged and therefore put an answer they feel you want or put what others have put. Thus making it bias.

Secondary research

Secondary research is other people’s work. It could be Books, Internet forums even the World Wide Web. Books are quite useful in secondary research as you can pick out the relevant information you need. You also only need to go to a library to access the books needed, so easy access. However, The books could be biased, one-sided, or out of date. This would make the books unreliable.

Secondary research is mainly used because it costs less than primary research and can be found in a larger variety of sources and interpretations. The World Wide Web is quick and cheap to use, gives a basic understanding of the information it gives and allows you to expand your research. But, websites like Wikipedia are not really trustworthy because anyone can edit it and they could be wrong and therefore the information taken isn’t reliable.

Qualitative research

Qualitative research is word-based research. This could be field notes, journals, observations & interviews. The advantages of qualitative research are that it is straight to the point instead of key information surrounded by unneeded information. It is just pure, specific information. With that it is easier to have an idea of what to expect in the bigger picture unlike quantitative research. It is a lot cheaper than quantitative as well since it is on a small scale. The disadvantage is that because it is on a small scale then you can only make assumptions on the small amount of info that you have and not on further audiences. This means that a safe assumption is not feasible.

Quantitative research

Quantitative research is number based. This could be statistics, surveys & viewing figures. This research has a relationship with both dependent and independent study. The advantages are that it can give a lot of detailed, accurate information. The disadvantages are that for quantitative research you need a large sample of the population since the larger the sample the more accurate. This leads to it being expensive. Also the numbers can change often so to keep up with the changes, the research needs to be done often. Thus wasting more money, as the process is expensive.

Audience Research
Audience research is split into different sub-catagories which are social capital, cultural capital, financial capital and educational capital. These sub-catagories are known as the Anthony Giddens theory. Social class is the main focus of Audience research. Social class is divided up

into these classes, A~Upper Middle Class, B~Middle Class, C1~Lower Middle Class, C2~Skilled Working Class, D~Working Class and E~Non-Working. Audience research into social class will help you understand what each class likes and expects so that when your production is finished you will have more people viewing your production.

Market Research
Market research is used to find out what people enjoy watching and listening to. This relates closely to audience research as people will be split into categories like sex, age, social class and education. Surveys can be used to find out what people like and also know what type of audience they are. This also requires looking at other productions similar to ones you ant to create to see which ones are popular and which are not. This also allows you to find out what type of information you can put into you production as you need to know if they can watch/listen to hard or soft news. This allows you to gain more ratings as by the end of the research you will know what interests different people.

Production research
Production research is focused on copyright, financial, locations, facility and time issues. These need to be research because if left un-researched the whole production could fall flat. Copyright is important as if you want to use somebody's song you have to credit the owner and sometime have to pay for usage, if you don't you can and most probably will get sued for forgery. Finance is important as you need to create a budget so that you can make profit on the production, within this budget you need to pay for actors/actresses, equipment and locations. You need to know when an actor/actress is available since you could hire a location for £500 a month and only have the actor/actress for two weeks, this makes it two weeks waste of money and have to pay extra to book it longer. Otherwise it would be a waste of time.

Conclusion

There is a potential for all research to obtain false information. In primary research people could give pressured answers, where they answer the same as the most popular answer. This could mess up the whole research. However, each research technique could give the researcher valuable information that the others might not.