RESEARCH METHODS - Unit 3

Qualitative Research 

Qualitative Research is investigating people's personal opinions. You can find this type of research from looking at documentary reviews, to get an understanding of what the general public thought. If you watch a documentary and look at positive reviews and take the good things the critic has said about the production, you can then use these techniques from the previous documentary film maker and use it to your advantage and let it help you and inspire you whilst creating your own documentary. Although people's opinions vary so it's important that you stick to your own opinion and don't fully take someone's opinion on board and create a documentary the way they want it to be, because not everyone has the same point of view.

Quantitative research 

Quantitative Research is investigating numbers and data. Looking at audience figures, how many people were tuning in to watch a documentary that was broadcasted on the BBC. How many men and how many women saw this? Which gender did it appeal to more? Also DVD Sales and Box Office Sales. This type of research is easily a huge advantage because these are facts, they aren't just someone's opinion. Finding out if a documentary was watched by millions of people would be great for a documentary makers advantage because they could take inspiration from what's popular which is easy to analyse from graphs and charts. Although this type of research is a much more narrower and perhaps superficial dataset and doesn't take into account the emotions, feelings, insights, motives, views of the people viewing this documentary into account. They might have watched it, but it doesn't mean that they enjoyed it, that's why it's important to get both types of research.

Different research methods...Primary and Secondary

Primary research is collecting information by yourself and NOT getting it from the internet, books etc. For example primary research is a collection of surveys, questionnaires, interviews and observations. 

Secondary research is getting information from collected data that somebody else has already documented. You can find this type of research in books, magazines, journals, newspapers.  It is a useful method because it allows the researcher to identify a topic that has easily accessible research.  

Production research

Production research is the about the content, the story and what the documentary is going to be about and what kind of sources of information that you might you need, for example people to interview and researching the best kind of data needed for this, which is primary research. To find production research you will be using qualitative and quantitative data and it also research methods such as primary and secondary. Finding out what's the best type of equipment to use whilst making a documentary is quantitate research because it helps us get facts and statistics about how to create a documentary with the correct equipment giving us a professional look to our footage and gives us a better understanding of equipment. We also need to know how many pieces of equipment we will need and how much this will cost, we will also use quantitate research for this. This type of research is also used for finding out who is qualified to be our crew members aswell as using secondary research. When finding out who the cast members are and which people we want to interview during our documentary, this is qualitative research because we are researching people's opinions and beliefs on the subject of our documentary. I will also be using secondary research to find documentaries and it's reviews that it has received from magazine arctile, website pages and this will give us a better insight into what a successful documentary needs to contain to get positive feedback from viewers, although a disadvantage is that these reviews might vary from one persons opinion to the other. So we won't fully depend on this type of research as it can also be unreliable to find out what makes something successful.

Audience research

Audience research is quantitate data because it helps to give us an idea of the amount of people that will be watching our documentary. Audience research has multiple different groups and advertising companies stereotype people, for example suggesting that males 16-30 like to go to the pub and have a pint, watch Dave and watch sports on TV. These stereotypes are obviously not correct but you can get audience research that is very detailed and you can find out about their personal life. The way you find audience research is by finding out their social economic status, psychographics, regional identity, age, gender, sexuality, race/ethnicity, religion and if they like mainstream things or alternative different things. These are called psychographics, which puts people into different categories. This type of research helps us find out who our target audience will be and who we will be trying to appeal to. When we decide what the plot to our documentary is we will be able to find research for what audience will be interested in watching it and find out what else would appeal to them and try and involve it in our documentary. Using secondary research I will research existing documentaries that our target audience have already enjoyed, and see what appeals to them in those documentaries. In this situation the use of secondary research is much better than primary research because it will give us a more detailed idea of our target market. We should also use some primary research and create a questionnaire to find out what appeals to our target audience, like what their interests and hobbies are. By doing this it will give us a better insight in how to create a popular documentary by putting the things they like in our production. 

Marketing research

Using market research helps us to find out our competition and see whats already been created and documented. It also shows us successful documentaries and documentaries that have similar content to our documentary. Using market research we can find out why were our competitors documentaries successful by looking at the their target audience, style, content and the film maker and presenter, we do this by using secondary research. It also reveals advertising placement and how our documentary should be marketed, by using viral videos, trailers, billboards, trying to figure out what kind of data works best and which sells a film more. How previous documentaries have gained a large audience through their marketing techniques. To market our documentary we will be using qualitative data and quantitive data, by finding a similar documentary with content close to our ideas we will research how they marketed their production to their target audience. Qualitative data will give us a better understanding about successful techniques that documentary makers use to reach their audience in a professional way. Qualitative data will tell us how many marketing techniques we will need to use to help us to advertise and reach a wider audience and this will be using secondary research because it will be information that has already been documented about how much a successful documentary film was marketed. Using primary research we can use our own original ideas on how we want to market our film, but by doing  this it could make it less successful but it could help us as we aren't doing something that hasn't already been done by a successful documentary, we might think about creating hand made advertisements like posters and billboards and pictures in magazines, newspapers. When we come to research this data in order to make our documentary a success we will be using a wide range of research techniques.

My conclusion is that there are positives and negatives to each different type of research, this is why it is important to balance out different research techniques and use them all in different ways when creating our documentary and not just focusing on one type.