Understand The Nature And Purposes of Research In The Creative Media Industries

Research in the creative media industries is vital in all aspects and is the essential starting point for any type or size production. There are five types/methods of research many people use before they start production ideas; primary, secondary, quantitative, qualitative and date gathering agencies. Primary research is research undertaken by yourself for example questionnaires, observations, interviews and experiments. You could class test screenings of upcoming film as primary research like the Dark Knight Rises. They released a test screening and after receiving bad audience feedback, they re-cut the whole film just based on primary research. In our presentation and research for re marketing a movie we used primary research as we created  our own survey to find out what the viewers liked and didn't like. Secondary research is the summary of existing research for example internet sources, book, film/photo archives and organisations publishing statistics. Organisations publishing statistics are websites such a GOVT and BARB. Both website give information of television viewing figures in the UK which they receive from another source making them secondary information. Quantitative research is research data which is concerned with numbers, amounts and fixed categories for example box office taking, website hits, percentages and audience figures. Quantitative research is often produced by closed questioning. Qualitative research is the data which can not be expressed numerically for example film reviews, fan blogs, news stories and responses to adverts. Some question asked in questionnaires are qualitative because it's not a numerical value in the answer. Date gathering agencies are responsible in collection and maintaining company-specific data and operating data entry devices for example BARB, RATAR, IMDB and Box offices mojo. All four of these websites record either film information or television program information. Within the research in the creative media industries there are two purposes. Audience and market research then the Production research. Audience and market research is the audience data and also the audience profiling for example gender, age and race. This helps a film because it will inform the creators, directors and producers as to what kind of audience they are  aiming for. It also helps to see what competition is out there. Production research is the content, placement media, location, viability  cost/finance and personnel within the production. This is vital because the team needs to take into account all of the in's and out's of the production line. Finally you'll need to assess all of the research you have attained. To do this you need to check the validity, reliability and Representative and generalisability. For the validity people are not always honest, they can often say what they think you want to hear and this can always affect your results. To improve reliability you can repeat your tests, questionnaires and experiments a number of times and average out the results to receive a more valid set of results. Research in the creative media industries is vital and you have to be so specific to get the results you need.