Research

Primary research is research which is conducted yourself. It can be done in the form of questionaires, surveys or by observing things to find out. The upside is that, if done well, information is be applied directly to the the task set to you and by conduction it yourself you can choose the answer to be as broad of precise as you like. The downside is that primary research is very time consuming and may be wasteful if not done correctly. We conducted primary research when using surveys to find out what people thought of our redesigned posters in the last project.

Secondry research is reasearch which is aquired from another source. It is data that exists already and has been carried out via a second party which is used by you. It can be found mostly anywhere - in books, the internet and even TV. Although the data may not be that reliable (depending on where you obtained it) but it is alot easier and quicker to find and may save you masses of time. We used secondry research in our last assignment when find out about films using secondry research from such sites as IMDB.

Quantitative Research is usually questionaire carried out on a large number of people. It used closed questions so that the answer can be analysed and put in tallys and statistics. an example of quantitative research is the production budgets of films.

Qualitative research is research which looks for peoples feelings and views on things getting them to express their thoughts on a subject again like when i asked people what they thought of my newly designed poster. This may be used in pre screenings of a film to see what people think, say if its a comedy they will look for the laughter and then see what the person thought made it funny.

Data gathering agencies basically record viewing figures for different types of media. Barb.co.uk is the website which messures viewing figures for every british tv channel to see what got the most views. This may be helpful to advertisers to see what slots are the best to advertise in and how they could expose their ad to the most people. Other agencies include - Rajar.co.uk messure the listening figures for UK radio stations and abc.org.uk research a companies to see where they could make more money and where they're losing money.

Audience research concists of basically stereotyping people and profiling into two catagories demographics and psycographics. Demgraphics are the things which are fixed about people like their gender, ethnicity, what class they are concidered to be where-as psycographics finds out abot peoples personalitis focusing on their beliefs, attitudes and interests. They use this information to see where their product is best aimed at, for instance if you had a washing powder you would aim it at middle class women as they are most likely to do their own washing and be most susceptable to the ad.

Product research  is seeing what is on the market similar to the product your looking to develop. This can help you decide how to improve your design and how to market it and give your product  USP over the competitors. This idea was performed in our first project when we had to research the 60 second short films in order to give us ideas for our own.

Vailidity is performing market reasearch on a few products so if you get anomolous data then you can discard it and take the data from another place. By carrying out questionaries and such on lots of people then it becomes more reliable as the data can be applied wider and as it consists of more peoples opiniuns theres more data to analyse. In our previous project on redesigning posters we survey over 10 people so our results would be more valid.

Representativeness and generalisability is surveying lots of different people according to Pschographics and Demographics so you get a more varied answer into what different people like and dislike helping to create something which is appealing to a large target audience. In my survey for my poster i asked a niche audience which was an all male College media group whos ideas and Pschographics would tend to be similar in comparison to results if i would have asked a broader number of respondants.