The Nature and Purposes of Research in the Creative Media Industries

The Nature and Purposes of Research in the Creative Media Industries 

Primary research

Primary research is research conducted personally. Primary research can only come from the person performing it and can not come from a third party or external source.

The primary research we conducted includes a questionnaire and the organization of  the interviews for our documentary. The survey can be found here

Primary research can be more reliable in some situations as it is information you have gathered yourself, so any doubts about the source or authenticity of the information are non-existent.

Some examples of primary research includes surveys, questionnaires and interviews. primary research is very useful for projects like this because of it's reliability, information from the internet is not always reliable but primary research is guaranteed to be reliable since you are the source of information.

The pictures below are the responses for the survey I created for this piece of work. I tried to get a good mix of people by e-mailing the survey around the class.

The other piece of primary research I performed was finding the interviewees themselves. I wanted to find people who could talk about gaming from a consumer standpoint and an educational standpoint.

Secondary Research

Secondary research is any research taken from an external source or third party. For example, you may find an article on google backing up the point you are trying to make. I used various examples of violence in real situations which people have believed can be attributed to video games. The majority of this research came from this Wikipedia article and the rest from various other sources (listed below)

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/nov/10/video-games-violent-study-finds

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jcom.12129/full

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-26049333

http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/gaming/longterm-us-study-finds-no-links-between-violent-video-games-and-youth-violence-9851613.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_controversies#US_publicized_incidents

http://www.video-game-addiction.org/violence.html

http://www.gamespot.com/articles/violent-video-games-dont-lead-to-increases-in-viol/1100-6422421/

http://time.com/34075/how-violent-video-games-change-kids-attitudes-about-aggression/

http://www.polygon.com/2014/9/12/6141515/do-violent-video-games-actually-reduce-real-world-crime

http://videogames.procon.org/view.resource.php?resourceID=003627

The whole research document can be found here

Contrary to my previous statement about primary research, secondary research is in some cases more reliable providing that it is from a genuine source. Most of the secondary research I gathered was from legitimate and professional websites/critics.

Quantitative research

Quantitative research is any research containing facts and figures such as profit, box office sales or ratings.
All of our quantitative research was in our survey in the questions that provided data in the form of numbers and figures (shown below).

This graph shows the split between the male and female participants for my survey.

This graph shows how frequently the audience I chose plays violent video games.

These percentages show the difference between which people think society has become de-sensitized to violence and how many would change the rating system for games. 

Qualitative research

Qualitative research is any research containing worded opinions and responses to media by people. For example, written reviews for films, TV and games as well as generalized discussion. All of my qualitative research consisted of discussions with my peers about current events in gaming and their reactions to them, more specifically the recently released Mortal Kombat X a game series notorious for its gratuitous violence. None of this research was recorded but Mortal Kombat is discussed in the final documentary.

Data gathering agencies

Data gathering agencies collect data from consumers and display it on a website or document. Examples of data gathering agencies include BARB Broadcasters’ Audience Research Board) RAJAR (Radio Joint Audience Research Ltd.) 

BARB record how many people are watching TV programmes and when allowing you to figure out when the most people will be watching TV. BARB figures were especially useful when I was doing advertisements as I could see a physical interpretation of where the best place was to place my advert. JAFAR is a similar service to the BARB but gather figures from radio broadcasts.

Audience and market research

Audience and market research is research you perform in order to better understand your audience, by learning your audiences demographics and psychographics you can better target your product to your audience. The audience research I performed consisted of the aforementioned survey which allowed me to gather my peers age, gender, location, and their opinions on violent video games.

3 Minute Wonder

These are a few screenshots taken from my 3 minute wonder. 

Production research

Production research is any research done pre-production such as making sure you have the correct permissions for actors, locations and equipment. For my production I had to get permission from all the actors I intended to use in my production as well as permission for the locations I used and the equipment.

For our documentary we had to fill out various pieces of pre-production paperwork. Some pieces we had to complete included location releases, actor releases, storyboards, schedules etc. All the paper work can be found in the link below.

This is all the pre-production paperwork for the documentary

This is the link to the other research post which goes into more detail