Research Techniques

The purpose of research...

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Grading:

So, why do we carry out research? What is the point?

Lets start by thinking about the influence the media has in society.......

We want to know if our target audience is going to respond to, buy into, consume our product.

So, what effect can our product have? What effect does the media have?

If we know our audience, we know what they want or we can help them to know what they want.

Does the public get what the public wants? Or does the public want what the public gets?

You will cover many apects of this unit when you are carrying out research for your other units and you must evidence that in Unit 1, either by providing physical copy, or by creating a hyperlink to the relevant research.

Market Research...
When you are creating a product, opening a restaurant, selling a new brand of mobile phone, you must assess the market that you are about to enter. If you are going to open a new Chinese restaurant in your town, you need to know....

How many people will have access to it?
How many of you audience will be aware of the restaurant, just from passing by?
Where are people likely to travel form to eat in your town?
What type of people live in or just eat in the area? What is their dispendable income? Do they have a diserning pallete? Will the family be coming to eat? Is the population made up of young people, in groups or couples?
How often to people eat out in the area? What leisure time to people have? Is it a business area where people eat out for lunch rather than dinner?
Will people welcome a new restaurant in the area? Are they already fed up of too many busy businesses on that street? Are people in the area open to the idea of new, forward thinking places, with unusual interior and an exotic menu? Are people just happy with the a good old fashioned style?
What other restaurants or takeaways are there in the area? What do they serve? How do they serve?
Where will be the best places to advertise your business? Are there any bars or pubs near by?
How have other new businesses advertised and what effect has it had on their business? Special offers? Vouchers to collect in the local paper for a free meal? A radio advertisement???????????

All of the above statements are specific forms of market research but what are they?

Try and match the sentences above, with the terms below...

Advertising effects, competitor analysis, advertising placement,

consumer behaviour, consumer attitudes, audience data,

audience awareness, audience profiling, product reach.

You are setting up a new radio station in the area but you need to do some research. I think you can guess what you need to do. Use the headings to structure your research but think inventively about how you present it.

You must also research how you plan to set up the project.....

Setting up.....

What about the costs of setting up this station? How many staff will you need? What equipment will you need?

These are all questions that you need to research...

Content
What kind of programmes should you broadcast?
What type of music should you play?

Resources
Who will you need to help you run the station?
What skills will they need to have?
How much will you need to pay them?

What equipment will you need?
Where can you broadcast from?

Costs
How much will the equipment cost?
The streaming?
The licences?

Viability?
How realistic are your plans?
How could you scale down the project?

Placement
Do you broadcast for a period of time?
Stream online?
Make podcasts available for download?

Audience
How will your audience want to access your product?

Competitors
How are your competitors delivering their product and in what form?

You are a media student.....think audio and visual interviews, blogs, recording phone calls, screen shots etc......

Remember, if you have examples of this research elsewhere, reference it and just fill in the gaps, with the new research.

How you carry out this research and the methods you use are outlined in the next blog, followed by different techniques for presenting your findings........

Applying research methods and techniques..

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Resource Procedures

Task 1. You must visit your local council library or university library and find out 3 facts about the population of Pudsey....

What is the population of Leeds?
Who makes up this population? What percentage of people are, women/men/old/young/employed/unemployed?
What is the population of Pudsey?

When you are at the library and you have found one of the facts above, you must note down,

The name of the book
The name of the author
The page number
The year that the book was printed

You must loan at least one book form the library and then bring this book into school, pointing out to your teacher, exactly where you found a specific fact in that book.
You should explain briefly, the process you went through, in order to find out the relevant information.

We must always reference the information we have found. When we are indulging in secondary research, if you are writing a report or an essay, you must make explicit, any statistics, tables or points of view that you have gleaned from secondary sources. This ensures that our work is professional and avoids plagiarism....

Defining Plagiarism
Plagiarism is a form of cheating and is a serious academic offence. It arises where work submitted by a student is not their own and has been taken from another source. The original material is then hidden from the marker, either by not referencing it properly, by paraphrasing it or by not mentioning it at all.

The most common forms of plagiarism are:

.......cut/copy and pasted material from the Web;

.......copying the work of another student (past or present), including essay material, tables and graphs, computer source code, research etc...

.......copying course material or lecture notes;

......copying material out of a textbook or journal

The key is proper attribution of source material. None of the activities listed above is, of itself, necessarily wrong.

Referencing...

Why reference?
To do sound written research you need to cite references honestly and professionally. This lets the reader check quotations and data, and consult the sources used. Referencing makes sure that you avoid plagiarism and shows the reading you have done.

You need to make references when you

quote - use someone's exact words

summarise - sum up someone else's arguments or ideas

paraphrase - put another author's material into your own words

copy - use illustrations such as: diagrams, tables, charts or maps

When you write academic assignments you are expected to refer to ideas and material produced by others. The kinds of information you use will vary and may include: theories, viewpoints, research, diagrams and statistics. You have to acknowledge the author of each source.
There are two main parts to citing references:

how you acknowledge your sources in the text.

how you list your sources at the end of your work in the reference list or bibliography.

For a full run down of how to reference.....

Task 2: You must present your information in the following way......

Author: Lawrence G./ Year and Page (2007 p.125)

Lawrence G. (2007 p.125)

So your facts from the library, must be presented with footnotes, structures as explained above.

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Types of Research

Quantitative Research: Quantitative research is carried out in order to find patterns, statistics and is often presented in the form of tables, charts and graphs.

Secondary Sources: Are sources that we use to find out information. We use publications, newspapers, journals, websites, blogs, wikis etc....
Secondary resources are resources produced by other people and as always we must reference accordingly.

Task 3: You must carry out research, to find out the

following....

What radio station is the most listened to radio station in England?
How many hours per week does an average person spend listening to the radio?
Which 4 regions do Galaxy Radio cover?

http://www.rajar.co.uk/

What is a restricted service licence?
How much would it cost to purchase a restricted service licence for one month?
What is PRS/MCPS/PPL?
How much would the PRS/MCPS/PPL copyright cost?
How much would the MCPS copyright cost?
How much would it cost to hire a transmitter for one month?
What would the total cost be?

http://www.mediauk.com/the_knowledge/i.muk/Running_an_RSL
http://www.ofcom.org.uk/radio/ifi/rbl/rsls/
MCPS and PRS
http://www.ppluk.com/

Primary Sources: This is when we undertake our own research. We are still looking for quantitative results but we are carrying out the research, in the form of a questionnaire, a survey, a poll etc...

Task 4. You must carry out your own research, to find out.....

What is the average amount of time per week that people in your school spend listening to the radio?
What is the most popular radio station in your school?
What is the most popular way of listening to the radio? (Traditional analogue, digital TV, mobile phone, Internet, digital radio, car radio.)

Qualitative Research: Research that is looking for quality information. This type of research is looking to find out more than just, how many people do a certain thing but rather, why and how they do it.

Secondary Resources: For qualititative research, newspaper articles, web documents, TV and radio programmes...

Task 5: You must undertake research to find out...

Why Terry Wogan's breakfast show is the most listened to radio show in the country?
What it is like to be the producer of a radio programme?
What it is like to be a presenter of a radio programme?
What the future holds for radio?

Primary Resources: You could undertake interviews but..

Think about uniformity of questioning...
(Are you asking the same questions to people? Are you leading them into saying something?)

Interpersonal dynamics...
(Will the person just say what they think you want to hear? Are thy just trying to impress? Are they witholding information because they are in front of their mates? Are they trying to make themselves look more/less intelligent?)

Pros and cons of interviews for reseach..
Structuring your interview...

You could use audience observations and record your results, through videos or photographs...

Task 6: Conduct research to find out.....

Why do people in your school listen to the radio?
Why do people listen to their favourite radio show/station? What is it about the programme(s)/presenter(s)/music, which make them listen?
What makes a particular station appeal to a certain age group/gender?
What is the most popular way of listening to the radio? (Traditional analogue, digital TV, mobile phone, Internet, digital radio, car radio.) Why is this the most popular way of listening to the radio?

Consumer Categorisation:

What are the social positions of the audience members?

Consider how the following may effect the way an audience interact with a media text and why it is important that media producers are aware of their audiences demographic.

Self image: How does the audience member feel she or he is viewed, as a result of identifying with and even buying into an identity that is linked with a media text, or series of texts?
ie; being a trekky, a goth, an emo etc;

Gender: Does being a male or female mean you are attracted to particular genres?
Are people drawn to texts that they feel their gender should be drawn to?
(For example, men and sport stations)
Who decides that particular sexes should be attracted to particular texts?
Do media producers aim specific texts at specific genders?

Age group: Should age make a difference? Think about the questions stated above and relate them to age..

Family: What is a family audience?
What type of texts appeal to family audiences?
Does such a thing exist in Radio anymore?

Class: What's class got to do with it? (Refer to table below)

Does being part of a certain class mean you are attracted to particular stations?
Are people drawn to stations that they feel their class should be drawn to?
Watch and listen to the final section of the film below.......

Who decides that particular classes should be attracted to particular texts?
Do media producers aim specific texts at a specific class?

Ethnicity: Once again, consider the questions posed in earlier questions when related to ethnicity.

Religion: Why must producers be aware of the different religous denominations that are present in their target audience?
How might the glorification of sex and violence be received by certain factions of different religions?
The media often tackles the difficult task of representing religion and people who are intrinsically linked by religion, why is this a risky process?

Education: Does your education play a role in the way you receive and interact with media texts?
Do media producers shape texts to be aimed at educated, or less educated people?

Location (geographical & local): Is where you live important in the eyes of media producers?
If so why?
Is it linked to gender, family, age, class, ethnicity, religion, education, wealth, politics?
The world is a smaller place because of the advancements in technology, how does this effect the make-up of audiences and all of the categories above?

Task 7: Write a short report, answering the questions posed above, in relation to radio listeners......

Presenting Results.....

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Task 8: You will present you results in the appropriate format on your blog.

Task 9: You will also perform a short presentation, which will be filmed and added to you iweb document.
In your presentation, you should include any relevant research, which should be summarised and linked to you proposal. Your proposal should cover the type of radio station you will be launching and why?

Please use the following points to shape your presentation....

1. Introduce yourself and explain who you are, why you are here and any experience you have in radio.

2. Explain the idea of setting up a radio station and explain why you think there is a need for this radio station in leeds. (briefly)

3.Present your research findings:

Primary: Quantitative and Qualitative
Secondary: Quantitative and Qualitative
Explain how these results show the need for this type of station in the area.

4. Explain the total cost of setting up an RSL and provide a brief breakdown.

5. Provide a rough timetable of programmes that will be broadcast and explain your choice of genres and scheduling.

6. Explain the possible formats in which you might broadcast and why. (Online, podcasts etc)

7. Explain that you are looking for an investment of £xxx to help you fund your project and

ask the observers if they have any questions they would like to ask.

Task 10: You should make sure all secondary research has been referenced and then produce a bibliography
NB: Make sure you have permission to use people or sources in your research and presentation.....