The Nature and Purposes of Research in the Creative Media Industries

Research is an important feature to all areas of creative media as it becomes the starting point of every production, the collection of data that is gathered over time and then analysed to give a further understanding into one (or more) topic or area that are being studying into (such as a production). Being a fundamental point in any production research can be collected in multiple ways and majority of the time all productions will gather the information in a range of ways, the main two ways of gathering information are through primary and secondary sources.

Primary Research is a really reliable way of gathering data as the data is acquired first hand rather than obtaining it from other sources. Primary research is done through various ways such as interviews, questionnaires, observations, focus groups and those kinds of interactive face-to-face bases. For my documentary I gathered primary research by going to Kayla and talking to her family about her, and just getting a little background knowledge, not only that but having an interview with her prior to the documentary was another source of primary research. I also did a survey where I gathered information from the college about self harm and this was done on Smart Survey in which I had a range of questions that were asked to find out more about what I wanted to research and how it affected others. The link to the survey can be found at http://www.smartsurvey.co.uk/s/107713KWJPH where the questions I asked are.

Secondary Research is then the flip side where this is information that has already been collected from somebody else and you are basically using their results for your knowledge, these can be from books, journals, newspapers, searching the internet forums and others, all of which you just use someones information. The internet was my main form for gathering secondary information as I went across various websites to find information, such as statistics that I would find useful to me, some of these websites were from http://www.youngminds.org.uk/training_services/policy/mental_health_statistics which is a website I found to be very useful as it gave me a lot of information that I didn't know about, and mainly just a little knowledge that has really helped me in understanding the topic a little more. I probably could have further backed my knowledge by going to the library and looking at books and seeing other people's perspectives that had been published and not sourced from the internet.

Moving on from the main two types of ways to collect data, you can then move on to the data you've collected and how well it is, such as in quality and quantity. Sometimes it is difficult to achieve a good balance between the two to get a really thorough and reliable set of results.

Firstly there is Quantitative Data, which is data that is collected in more of a quality, amount or range, such as program ratings, box office figures, sales and other numerical based ways. It's done on a larger scale of gathering a lot of information and just throwing the figures together, it's a way of collecting data and looking at the general overview with the numbers rather than looking into it further for detail. Doing the surveys was my way of collecting a numerical amount of data in which I got a lot of responses which were easy to look at and tell, the numbers which distinguished which answer was more appropriate and also it gave me a chance to see what the opinions of lots of students were.

Qualitative Data is where you then go into more detail and it's more quality rather than quantity realistically. This is where topics are gone into in much more depth and more analysis rather than looking at the figures of something, this is a really good way to get detailed data though it does take a lot more time and effort as the data needs to be detailed and that takes time. This come be done in the sense of film reviews, game reviews, responses to news coverage and discussions. With my work with some of my survey questions instead of clicking yes or no, it was an open ended answer therefore each individual had the chance to right what they thought, this gave me a view of each person and see what the problems were in their situations, but the data was detailed and qualitative.


After looking at the types to collect and the way it's analysed, there are also Data Gathering Agencies which are in place to share the information with people that are searching for certain things, though this data is gathered over time it is then always used to look back onto for later information or for when new things arise, a main data gathering agency is the Broadcasters' Audience Research Board (BARB) which is a company that gathers audience measurements and television ratings in the UK. The data that is on there website is gathered from various participants who have a box on top of their TV sets which tracks the programs that they watch, giving BARB a view of what programs are popular. BARB has further companies which then design and measure certain things within the company to make sure that all the viewings are right so that the data gathering is done properly.


There are also various other data gathering agencies which approach different sectors such as IMDb which is an online database for movies, television and online games. This has been an ongoing site for twenty-three years and has over 2,912,553 titles in it;s database. This site has the chance for each individual to submit their own material and also make edits to any existing data that is already on the site, though this has to be checked by higher authorities first, the website has been known to make errors but takes control of situations by making it's data as true as it can possibly be. A subsidiary of IMDb is a smaller company that tracks box office revenue's is Box Office Mojo, a smaller company that has been part of IMDb since 2008.

Audience and Market research is the next step where you have to see if the product you are about to produce is going to be suitable or any good for the public and therefore you need to test the product by reaching out to your target audience, this is classed as audience and market research. For my documentary I had to think about who my documentary would be suitable for in terms of demographics and looking at the age I thought that it would be appropriate for adults, to see this as something to learn from and also if they thought that their child may be suffering or having problems not only that but it could also apply to teenagers of Kayla's age because they could relate or once again learn from her experience. Saying this, the adult is more appropriate also in terms of the times that the documentary would be shown as this would be on around 7:55pm as a three minute wonder I also had to think about the fact that adults are more likely to be watching the TV at this time.

Production Research consists of the identification of the resources you will need to carry out the production, in some way it's the final gathering and analysis of all of the data and information you have already collection. Before filming begun for my documentary I had produce an array of information that would make my documentary doable, such as collecting consent from Kayla's parent and making sure she would sign the location release form and also making sure that I knew what dates I would be filming with the production schedule, these were important pieces of pre-production that not only me but every production no matter how big or small would need to do.

After gathering all the research and assessing it you then need to know how reliable and valid the data is. The reliability is finding out how reliable the data is and is a very important process in all productions. With my work I had to make sure that the results of my survey were reliable but with some of the answers people gave I knew that they were not as reliable as they were being rude and inconsiderate and therefore this made my results less reliable.
Reliability is an important factor, for example if a teacher asks it's class how many hours a week it spends at home working on that subject, it's likely that the student(s) that are asked will exaggerate there answer because they should be spending a lot of time and it's likely they aren't. This makes the results less reliable because they aren't the truth.

On the other hand, I still feel with the outlying answers that my data can still be reliable. This is further backed by how valid the data is, and this is how things are tested. With the survey that I created you can agree that my results are valid, but if I had done this test again or even repeated it on other occasions to get a more general range of answers then it would make my data more valid.
With Validity, you want to see how valid the data is, for example, when testing a method of 'How many Christians go to church' and you count the percentage of how many people went to church that week in various places, that doesn't then mean that the percentage that went to church are the percent of Christians because they may not be all Christians, this makes the method less valid.

Finally, I think that generalising my data is quite difficult, as I can't generalise it to the entire world purely because I only did my surveys on college students, and therefore I can't say that everybody else is the same to what I found out, though I have the change to make my data represent the college or even colleges in general as I have had around one hundred responses, and this is a wide sample which I can generalise.
Represenstativeness is another area of assessing data and with this you have to see if the data can repreent everyone, as in my example above, if you do a study on one class of 16-19 year olds, you can't generalise the results to all students 16-19 because that one single class can't represent the entire load of teenagers and they can't be generalised.