Friday 11th February 2011

Today, Mr O'Hara talked to us about 'Audience Research' in order to aid us with the making of our film openings. There are two types of audience research, first there is Quantitive Research which is audience research based on numbers (such as how many people, films, viewing hours etc.). The ways of carrying out this research include paper questionnaires (questions written down on paper and given out to various people) and digital questionnaires (questions asked through digital methods). Advantages of this are that you are able to use pie charts, graphs etc when you use a digital questionnaire however the fact that you use closed questions doesn't give much rich information. The second form of audience research is Qualitative Research. This type of research is made up of questions asking the person doing the questionnaire about the quality of the answers to various questions. These types of Qualitative Research include interviews with the individual about their film preferences, open questions which are generated to be open to interpretation, interviews with a group of people called 'Panel Interviews' and the use of examples of film extracts used for people to discuss called a 'Focus Group'. There is also the usage of the Likerte Scale for open questions which often go something along the lines of this: 1 - Strongly Disagree 2 - Disagree 3 - Undecided 4 - Agree 5 - Strongly Agree Sometimes these Likerte Scales can go up to 10 rather than the usual 5.