Essay Questions

1: What research methods can be used?

There are many different ways you can use research methods, they all have their advantages and disadvantages and there is not a best method overall the best method will depend what you on doing your research on.

Two types of research methods to receive data or information is qualitative or quantitative. This type of data would be useful for statistics as part of an infographic or to show clear graphs of audience behaviour. As I said before there is not a best method overall it just depends on what you want to find out, for example if a film company wanted to find out what consumers would want to see in a new movie, although quantitative data will help, qualitative would probably be better as they would be getting more detailed answers helping them know what customers would want to see more. Qualitative data gives you a better analysis of your findings and will give you a context to the answers.  If you mix the two findings together quantitive data would help define your finding and qualitative data would help you describe the findings. There’s a wide range of methods you can use to carry out research on your audiences, but it is advised to choose these methods depending on the kind of data you wish to collect.

Another two methods of research used would be questionnaires and surveys. They are a relatively easy way to gather data and can provide you with quantitive and sometimes qualitative results that are easy to measure and analyse. They can be created in many different ways, they can be sent through email or social media, they could be made by using online tools such as survey monkey however a disadvantage of this is that you have no control of who is answering your questionnaire if it is online which could potentially make results unreliable. Lastly  you could just make one on paper and go out and ask the public which would probably be the quickest option. Advantages of using questionnaires and surveys are they are quick to design and send out to large samples, and they are easy to measure. However disadvantages are not being able to gain detail from the responses and who is responding.

Another research method is focus groups, focus groups are like group interviews, a researcher will ask a group questions relevant to to what they want find out. This is a good method as you get in depth opinion from a group, however if there is a controlling person in the chat it could make people who don't like speaking publicly quiet and keep their opinion to themselves.

2: Why should audience research be completed?

Audience research should be completed to get a better and improved understanding of your target audiences. An example of this would be, if a production company went around and asked opinion for what genre films consumers like, they could possibly have had the wrong idea if they hadn't asked and