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Christopher ONeill

Research techniques for the creative

Media Industries
Research Assignment
Christopher ONeill
ND semester 1- 2014/15

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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)

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Quantitative Research
Quantitative research is about gaining peoples honest
opinions by asking them specific questions in order to gain
hard facts and statistics, its 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.

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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.

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http://www.washingtonpost.com/
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

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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 its 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.

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http://www.gopixpic.com/

Secondary Research
This 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.

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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 peoples 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.

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Advertising placement: This would be the research someone
would do to find an ideal place to put an advertising so its target
audience sees it, this is very important as if you dont place it in the
ideal place its going to have a impact on sales.
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 its 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
competitors trends, and by leaning those you can get one over
them by countering with something better.

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

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

My Research
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 Grainnes interview we realized it was quite
long, so we decided to only focus on the buildings 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?

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Research Evaluation
Research process

The 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 Profile
In 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 project

For 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

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understood who our target audience were thanks to the research
that we did.
The weakness was that we didnt 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 the people there wanted from us,
this type of research is very important for anyone who wants to
succeed in any business venture.

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Research techniques assignment

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.

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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.

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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.