The Nature and purposes of research

Primary research

Primary research is a type of  research that is original data and has not already been used. this includes, interviews, telephone interviews and also the use of surveys and questionnaires. The advantages of using primary is the researcher can focus on both quantitative and qualitative data can be focused on. Another advantage of using primary research is it addresses specific areas as the researcher controls the research design to fit their needs. For my primary research i made a survey on the website smartsurvey.co.uk : http://www.smartsurvey.co.uk/s/107129BUKUJ. I distributed my survey through Facebook, email and also i printed a few out and gave them to people.

Secondary Research

Secondary research is research that you collect but has not been done by you. It is research that already exists. this can be very useful as it is a lot quicker to collect secondary research as opposed to the slow process of collecting primary research. you can find secondary research almost anywhere, some examples include books, the internet, the television and the radio to name a few. for my secondary research i searched the internet for recent news stories involving terrapins and or other reptiles. i also searched the internet for exotic pet shops in my area as i thought it would give me a good idea of the audience for exotic pets.



                Quantitative Research

Quantitative research is the collection of numerical data and is usually used in statistical analysis. examples of this include television ratings, box office ratings and sales of DVD's, Blu Rays. for my quantitive data research i made some of the questions on my survey quantative data questions.

'*7. would you ever consider owning a terrapin/other type of reptile?'

1	Yes		42.11
2	No		57.89%

Qualitative Research

Qualitative data is the collection of non numerical data. rather than just focusing on statistics this type of research allows conclusions to be drawn from the view of the audience. one big example of qualitative research is film reviews these allow the filmmaker to see how much their audience like the film and also get some feedback about the film. in my research  had a couple of qualitative research questions in my survey:

'5. why do you think that people like to keep reptiles?'

'8. what do you think when people keep exotic pets?'

This allowed me to get an understanding of what my audience feel and know about the subject of reptiles and exotic pets. These are some of the answers I received for question five:

'I am not too sure'

'because they like them'

'they're cooler than cats and dogs'

Data gathering websites

Data gathering agencies are companies that gather tonnes of data and are responsible for maintaining company specific data and operating the data entry devices. some examples include IMDB and box officemojo. both of these companies collect and analyse huge amounts of data from the general public. BARB is also one such company that is the official source of television viewing figures in the UK. it collects data on the amount of people that watch something at certain times on certain days and so on.

Audience and market research

Audience and market research is very important when making something to be viewed by the general public. the audience and market research that i did considered of looking on the barb website to see the demographics and phsychographics of the people who watch channel four at around 10pm as i knew that our documentaries could be shown to people at this time. i also looked to see how big the audience was for my chosen subject, i saw how big the viewing figures where for nature programmes and the like.

Production Research

For my production research I did a location reece of my house(where most of my documentary took place) and i did a recce of the location where an interviewee of mine was.

Assessing research data

Reliability

In terms of reliability i could say that my research data is quite reliable. i managed to get twenty people to answer to my questionnaire which is quite a solid number for a good amount of data. However some people do not take it very seriously so unfortunately some of the answers become void.

I think my participants where Representative of the population because they are the audience i was going for, late teens to late twenties because i think they would fully understand the quirkiness of the documentary and most of the people who responded to my survey where in that age group.