Nature and purposes
of research in the creative media industries
Purpose of research:
The purpose of research is to analyse in-depth and verify
the hypothesis. It also allows you to understand what the audience prefer and
how they react to your specific assignment and reach the conclusion you liked
to reach before going ahead with the research. For example; if a film was being
made the team will go out of their way to search if the genre of their film
will be most likely profited. They will do this by researching films that go
under the same genre and has been released within the same time period and see
in the box offices if they sold or not. By doing this they will be able to tell
if their film is money-making.
Primary/Secondary
research:
Primary research is research done by you or the company that
you’ve hired to complete the assignment whether it’s done by a focus group,
survey, questionnaire, observations and experiments. What is found within
primary research can be either quantitative data (statistics, numerals) or
qualitative data (reasons and opinions from the public). Primary research is beneficial as you are in control of the
quality and the specific needs that you are researching for. Although primary
research is simple and puts you in control there are many key disadvantages such as, it usually cost
more than secondary research, may be bias, and also takes longer to find
information. Secondary research is done by someone else. It can also be either
quantitative or qualitative data, it’s cheaper and quick. However, the research
may be too old to be counted in your research therefore it isn’t reliable and
it also isn’t specific to your needs.
The main advantage of collecting secondary research is that
the data has already been collected by someone else which doesn’t cost much to
gain this information. However, whilst search for this research done by another
person you must take on further research to see if the research you’ve found is
correct. To do this you should check if the research is longitudinal which
shows if the research you’ve found is similar to others who have also completed
the same research and see if it has been similar over a period of time. This
consents all researchers to look at the developments of the subject and changes
that have been made over time.
A major disadvantage of using secondary research is that the
data found may not answer the researcher’s needs or it may contain research
that the researcher does not need. Since the researcher did not collect the
data, he has no control over what is contained in the data set. Often times
this can limit the analysis or alter the original questions the researcher
sought to answer.
A related problem is that the variables may have been
defined or categorized differently than the researcher would have chosen. For
example, age may have been collected in categories rather than as a continuous
variable, or race may be defined as “White” and “Other” instead of containing
categories for every major race.
Another significant disadvantage of using secondary data is
that the researcher doesn't know exactly how the data collection process was
done and how well it was carried out. The researcher is not usually privy to
information about how seriously the data is affected by problems such as low
response rate or respondent misunderstanding of specific survey questions.
Sometimes this information is readily available, as is the case with many
federal data sets. However, many other secondary data sets are not accompanied
by this type of information and the analyst must learn to read between the
lines and consider what problems might have coloured the data collection
process.
There are many advantages
when proceeding with qualitative research for example the objective in which
you may be trying to gather may be covered in great depth and details including
all issues that may occur whilst your assignment. When undertaking an interview
the information you may get from it will not be limited as questions asked can be
either open or closed questions allow the interviewer to gain as much
information needed from their sample frame.
The disadvantages
of qualitative research is that some background information might be missing in
a sense that the information that is meant to be carried out may be incomplete
and might disrupt the outcome and also some researchers might possibly bias the
design of the study which means that the public may answer for examples
interviews, questionnaires, act in a way that they want them to. Also
qualitative research is quite time consuming however this could possibly take
up a lot of the researcher’s time and even last up to months and years. An
example that qualitative research is not always good is that when the question
is being asked it can be quite biased as if the researcher is putting
words into the respondent’s mouths, for example if a researcher was to ask Some
people think watching TV for hours is bad for you. What do you think?; this is
automatically putting words in it to the responders mouth and is therefore
answering the question in hour the researcher wants them to however the
researcher should instead ask the question like ‘What are your opinions about
watching for TV hours?’.
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