Nature and purposes of research.

Primary research

Primary research is research that is done first hand by someone. The person will carry out all research and analysis by them selves not gaining any information from other peoples previous research. Examples of this type of research include interviewing people, designing questionnaires and surveys and other types of people participation along as ll has been organised and completed originally by you.

Our actual documentary was basically a form of primary research in its self  as it is a collection of interviews that were conducted and arranged by us to extract information about young peoples knowledge and interest in politics. The interviewing method is also a type of qualitative data yielding rich in depth data from a few individuals. (INSERT PRINT SCREEN)
I also designed a questionnaire to access whether our idea of a documentary about young peoples attitudes towards politics would be received well by viewers. This is a method of primary research because the questionnaire was created and carried out by me personally, meaning any data acquired by the research belongs to me. Here are the questions and results gathered from the questionnaire:  

Primary research is important because it allows the researcher to gain the exact information they are wanting to extract and it is specific to the project they are researching for. You also know that the data you acquire is accurate and valid (if you have carried out the research properly) and that the results aren't bias. And lastly because primary research is done independently, only you will have the results, this wasn't an issue for us but in some circumstances can be a major positive.


Secondary research.

This is research that involves the finding and collation of existing research carried out by others. Some examples of secondary research can include documentation, letters, diaries, autobiographies and references from other research, film reviews and any other research or data created by other parties. For our documentary research we carried out secondary research when we went on government websites to find out past election turn outs and the voting turn outs of young people over the years. http://www.ukpolitical.info/Turnout45.htm

Quantitative research.

This is a logical and data led approach, measuring what people think from a statistical and numerical perspective. Examples of this research method include: Sales of CD's and DVD's, box office ratings, programme ratings and hits on a website. We found and used some quantitative data in the form of electoral turn out percentages for general elections that we collated from the government website. We also found the percentage of young people that voted in recent general election on the government website (https://www.gov.uk/ ) as this was what our documentary was focused on.

I also designed a multiple choice questionnaire that again asked questions about young peoples attitudes towards politics and also if they would be interested in watching a documentary investigating the reasons and facts behind it. Because the questions were multiple choice this yielded quantitative which can be seen above. The advantage of quantitative research is that a large sample can be acquired easily because of the nature of the research type. It is very easy to gather statistics and figures from a large proportion of people and this makes the data more reliable and representative of society as a whole. The disadvantage of this type of research is that the data yielded is binary by nature and therefore isn't as in depth as the data that qualitative research would yield.

Qualitative research.

This type of research uses exploratory techniques to collate information. Using this method often helps gather the understanding of reasons, opinions and motivations of people within the specific field you are researching about. This in turn helps to give insight into how to solve problems and develop hypotheses within that same field. For example we interviewed several students to find out what they knew about politics in the U.K. and how they felt about it. Using this qualitative method of interviewing we found out not only how they felt, but the reasons why the felt the way they did, which generated discussions and ideas on how to tackle young peoples apathetic attitudes towards politics and how to get them more involved.

The advantage of using this type of research is that the data it yields is very in depth which allows for the reasoning behind the data to also be analysed making the data more accurate. Its weakness is that because of the time consuming nature of qualitative methods, it is very hard to gather a large sample of participants which means the data isn't reliable and cannot be generalized to include the population as a whole.

Data gathering agencies.

Data gathering agencies to exactly that, gather data. Some examples of such agencies include The Broadcasters audience research board (BARB) and the Radio joint audience research organisation (RAJAR).

BARB is responsible for collating audience measurement data and television ratings for the U.K. They collect there data by recording the T.V shows participants watch and use this to generalize the data upon the rest of the country. Currently there are thought to be around 5100 homes that take part which is estimated to include around 11,500 people.

IMDb ( Internet Movie Database) Collates information about films, television programmes and video games as well as details of the casts and anyone else involved in the production of said media texts. Here are some examples of the information that IMDb gather.
As seen here we have lots of information about the film The Departed (Martin Scorsese, 2006). We can see the director, the writers and the main stars in the film. We also have a rating that is calculated by taking the ratings of users of the site and collecting an average. There are also user and critic reviews that are available to read giving a more in depth understanding of the films quality than that of the number rating. As you can see IMDb goes into intricate detail about thousands of movies and television programmes and it one of the leading websites in its field. The website also collates all the trailers and interviews related to every film on the web site.
Box office Mojo is a similar website that focuses mainly on the gross of films. For example of the website you will find a list of the top grossing films of the year as well as the current the week. The websites other functions include most of that which IMDb does such as giving release dates for films as well as ratings and other such information.

Audience and Market research.

For our documentary we carried out our own market and audience research in the form of a questionnaire as previously mentioned designed to find out if people would be interested in watching a documentary focusing on young peoples attitudes towards politics in the UK. This gave us the data required to ascertain whether or not the idea would be a successful one. As seen above the responses were primarily successful.


Production research.

For our documentary we had to arrange multiple interviews with students around the college including arranging a meeting with politics teacher Alex Spalding in his room. This required gathering permissions and release forms for locations and people we were going to film all of which is included in our pre-production papers. As students all of our equipment was provided for us by the college including cameras, SD cards, microphones and all of our editing software as well as the Macs we used to edit. All our filming took place in the college so we didn't have to pay to use any locations just the permission of the college which we attained with ease. In regards to copyrights the only difficulty we encountered was finding music we could use that didn't have one. Eventually we manage to find an appropriate song that didn't require a copyright to use.