Research Task 1Oliver Kaplan

Primary ResearchPrimary research is research that you do yourself. i.e. you complete first hand. Primary re-search can be carried out through questionnaires, surveys or interviews with either individ-uals or small groups depending on what works best for the research that is being carried out.

Primary research has many advantages. Firstly when completing primary research the re-searcher has complete control over the process and its objectives. Primary research is also more confidential. As you are are completing the research yourself you are collecting data that no other business will be able to access. The results of the research will only be seen by the researcher. Finally primary research is up to date research. With secondary research you could be looking at reports that are years old and lacking in current reliability, however as researchers carry our primary research by themselves the results will be up to date and therefore more accurate.

However their are a number of downsides to using primary research. Firstly it is extremely time consuming. The time required to complete this type of research fully and accurately is much longer than the time spent doing secondary research. Also in many cases primary research, especially in the cases of questionnaires and surveys, the information that is re-ceived is often false and biased.

An example of primary research being carried out in my corporate video was when we car-ried out a questionnaire as part of our audience research. This was done in order to help us select a specific demographic in which to target our corporate video at.

Secondary ResearchSecondary Research is research that you gain from other sources by making use of other publicly available information that has been previously researched for other purposes. Secondary research could come from books, news reports and articles, the internet or pre-viously carried out surveys and interviews that have been documented.

Secondary data is extremely useful because getting this information is much less expen-sive and a lot less time consuming than carrying out the research yourself. It also provides a basis for comparison for the data that is being collected.

There are drawbacks however to using secondary research. Firstly secondary information is not always correct or can be incomplete. In many cases secondary information is old in-formation that although once was very reliable has become outdated and an unreliable source. For example a newspaper report from 2003, although still accessible, would not be considered particularly reliable for research being completed in 2017 for present scenar-ios. Another downside to this is that you will need to check the credibility of the information that you are using. Anybody can post information online meaning that people’s opinions can very easily be mistaken for fact. Once again this will affect the reliability of the informa-tion.

We used Secondary Research when completing our market research for our corporate video. By using primarily the internet we were able to find various newspaper articles and

reports as well as a few videos that had already been created which we were then able to further analyse order to extract information abut how our video would best fit into the cur-rent market and what problems we could face. Specifically I found several newspaper arti-cles online such as The Telegraph and The Mirror which were extremely useful when find-ing out more information about how Loan Sharking operates and some of the alternatives.

Qualitative Qualitative research is any which does not involve numbers or numerical data. It often uses words or language but can also use photos and observations. Although qualitative data is much more general than quantitative there are still a number of ways for gathering it. These include interviews, observations and focus groups.

Qualitative data is extremely useful as results give an in-depth picture into the topic being researched. This helps the researcher to explore and understand how and why things have happened. It is also useful as almost anything can be examined in a qualitative way.

However there are a number of disadvantages to using qualitative research. Firstly the re-search quality is heavily dependent on the individual skills of the researcher and can be more easily influenced by the researcher's personal biases. Also the shear volume of data being researched makes the analysis and interpretation of qualitative research much harder and more time consuming. Finally the presence of the researcher during the gath-ering of the data, for example during an interview, can affect the responses that are given once again affecting the reliability of this type of research.

In a lecture from the Illegal Money Lending Team we received lots of qualitative data that assisted us when making our corporate film. For example we were shown a number of recorded interviews and some profiles of loan sharks as well as some of the victims of loan sharks. This gave us an insight into how loan sharks operate and some of their character-istics. This then helped going forward in our production as we were able to characterise our victims and loan sharks in a way that was very similar to these real life scenarios that we had seen making our film much more realistic. Without this qualitative information our film wouldn't have looked as believable as it was.

QuantitativeQuantitative research is research that involves the data of numbers and statistics. The data that is produced is always numerical and then analysed in a mathematical and statis-tical method. If no numbers are involved then it isn’t quantitative research. Some ways of gathering quantitive data could be through surveys, observations or questionnaires.

Quantitative research results are often much easier to gather than qualitative research. Researchers also often receive more results when completing quantitive research over qualitative, and the more results they receive the better the statistic.

However the results of quantitive data are limited as they provide numerical descriptions rather than detailed narrative and generally provide less elaborate accounts of human per-ception. Also in general there is a much higher cost to completing quantitive research over qualitative research.

During our lecture from the Illegal Money Lending Team we also received some quantitive data that helped us when making our production. In the talk we were told various statistics about the victims of loan sharks. For example there being over 310,000 households in the UK being affected by loansharking, a 50/50 split between male and female victims and only 53% seeking help from the authorities. Some of these statistics and pieces of quanti-tive data were used at the end of our corporate film in order to give genuine facts to the viewers.

Audience Research Audience research is the research that goes into people who you are aiming a product or service towards. Examples of these include audience profiling, demographics, geo-demo-graphics, consumer behaviour and audience awareness. Audience research helps the re-searcher to see clearly who they are aiming their product at.

Audience research can be extremely advantageous as it helps entrepreneurs to clearly de-fine there target audience and create an audience profile. It is also useful for finding out other likes and dislikes of different demographics.

However there are a number of disadvantages to compiling audience research. Firstly it can be very time consuming and extremely costly. Results of audience research are also often invalid as questions can be biased or responses can be vague and lack detail.

Before making our corporate video we completed audience research in the form of a ques-tionnaire and through a talk from the Illegal Money Lending Team. However this was diffi-cult as we found that anybody can be a victim of loan sharking. we found that both the older and younger demographic were being targeted as well as both the richer and poorer classes of society. Therefore going forward we had to make our corporate video appeal to all types of people.

Market ResearchMarket research is the process of collecting valuable information to help you find out if there is a market for your proposed product or service.

By completing market research entrepreneurs can look at existing products and services, to that of their own, and see what is being done well and what is being done badly in the current market. Market research is also useful as it helps to identify both any potential or any threats that could be faced.

However market research is once again extremely costly and takes an awful lot of time to compete. Also market research is primarily based on people’s opinions and views of a product or service rather than any actual fact. The lack of respondents may also be a neg-ative factor for a company’s market research.

By completing market research we were able to see that videos being made about loan sharking is quite a niche market. Therefore we decided that there was a good open gap in the market for a video like ours to be produced as long as we came up with a good original storyline to avoid being too generic like the few videos that were already on the market.

Production ResearchProduction research is a must when developing any new product. Simply it is any research that goes into the making of, or the production of a product. In filmmaking this covers the content and context of the film that you are producing, finances, resources and personnel and any location research.

Essentially the production research is the groundings or initial building blocks that make a film successful. There is a quote that stated “failing to plan is planning to fail” and this is so true when it comes to the production research involved in making a film. Without the nec-essary time put into the planning, everything will go wrong on the shooting day costing more time and money in the long run. Although production research does take a lot of time to complete it is important that it is done and with a good amount of detail to ensure that the shooting phase of the production runs as smoothly as possible.

Production research provided the foundations to our corporate video. Once we had come up with our story synopsis we began work on proposal and treatment documents in order to show our thought processes into how we wanted our video to look. From here we com-peted first draught scripts and storyboards. After this we started to research and consider various shooting locations, equipment, props and costume, (anything required for the mise en scen of our production) personnel such as actors and the crew as well as numerous budgeting and call sheets. All this came together into one pre-production folder containing all the documents that we needed for our three days of shooting. This led to a successful production as the correct methods of planning and production research had gone into it.