AUDIENCE RESEARCH EVALUATION

 

By Michael C. Bungay

 

Over the course of my two most recent Media Projects at Oaklands College, I have been taught three different ways of gathering Audience Research in order to help my peers and I to decide what to include in our film projects. These methods are a Questionnaire, a Survey and a Focus Group.

Now the question is which one of these methods is the most useful when it comes to gathering audience research? Well, that is a very difficult question to answer as all three methods have their pros and their cons and whatever I think those are may not represent the opinions of others.

First of all, for our Christmas Film Project, my peers and I each did an online Questionnaire using Survey Monkey. Theoretically, this did have the advantage of being distributed to a wide audience as it was posted on the internet where most people around the world could see it but it also had the disadvantage of potentially not receiving that many responses and therefore, limiting the amount of research gathered, as is what happened in my case. Questionnaires probably work better when my peers and I write them out and venture out into the local community to look for volunteers to fill them in as we did after we had finished filming and editing our Christmas Film. This way, we are seeking out the opinions of people of all ages, ethnic minorities, psychographics, demographics and socioeconomics. Posting a questionnaire on the internet does not have these advantages as we cannot actually see or find out very much about the people who take part other than what they expect to see in projects like ours.

Recently, my peers and I gathered audience research using a focus group. This largely involves seeking opinions from the rest of the class after we have done our research via a questionnaire or a survey. This does have the advantage of receiving feedback from people whom we are already working with but it is also limited to just the views of our peers and tutors which does not make for a wide audience as it lacks the views of different age groups to back it up. This therefore limits the amount of research gained when we need as much audience research as we can gather.

The other most recent method of gathering audience research my peers and I used was a Survey. This was similar to a questionnaire except it was shorter in terms of questions asked and it had to be filmed which further limited the amount of time we had to do it. This would potentially have the same advantages as a questionnaire but it did not quite achieve that as it had to be shorter and briefer thus limiting the range of the audience and the amount of research gathered and furthermore, the research we gathered was very limited and lacked reliability so on the whole, I feel a written questionnaire is the most useful way of gathering audience research.