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1. Research methods
& techniques
An introduction to
• Primary
• Secondary
• Quantitative
• Qualitative

2. Last week
What did we learn about in planning &
research?

3. Today
You will be recapping research methods and
techniques, before continuing with your
planning & research theory report.

4. By the end of today, you
• MUST understand the difference between
primary and secondary research
• SHOULD be able to explain the difference
between quantitative & qualitative
research
• COULD analyse different research
methods strengths and weaknesses.

5. Screen Writing
Why do we research?
To gather information that
• influences our creative ideas
• Identifies our audience
• Affects our planning
• Affects our production

6. In screen writing
A good script is built on great research
Like every other part of film & TV
screen writing involves research.
Lots & lots of research….

7. What are the 2 different
research methods?
1. Primary research
2. Secondary
research

8. Primary Research
What do we mean by primary research?

9. Primary Research
Information that doesn’t already exist
somewhere else
ie/ we find it out ourselves

10. Primary Research
What different techniques can we use when
conducting primary research?

11. Primary Research
What different techniques can we use when
conducting primary research?
• Surveys
• Questionnaires
• 1 on 1 interviews
• Focus groups

12. Primary Research
What are the strengths of primary research?

13. Primary Research
What are the strengths of primary research?
• Tailor the questions to find out the answers
you need
• Get in depth answers
• Original information so arguably more
reliable

14. Primary Research
What are the weaknesses of primary
research?

15. Primary Research
What are the weaknesses of primary
research?
• Time consuming (more stages to process)
• Expensive (staff costs)

16. Secondary Research
What do we mean by secondary research?

17. Secondary Research
Existing information which has been created
by someone else.

18. Secondary Research
What are the strengths of secondary
research?

19. Secondary Research
What are the strengths of secondary
research?
• Cheap (less staff, easier process to
manage, less travelling)
• Abundance of data available on the
internet

20. Secondary Research
What are the weaknesses of secondary
research?

21. Secondary Research
What are the weaknesses of secondary
research?
• May not answer your specific questions
• Can be time consuming finding information
• Verifying someone elses research is
difficult (less reliable)

22. Secondary Research
What different techniques can we use when
conducting secondary research?

23. Secondary Research
What different techniques can we use when
conducting secondary research?
• Internet search
• Newspaper / existing journalism
• Archive footage
• Reference books

24. Quantitative versus Qualitative questioning
There are 2 types of ‘data’ (ie. Information)
we can get back from our research:
• Quantitative
• Qualitative

25. Qualitative data
Eg. If we asked the question
What did you like or dislike about the
film ‘Chappie’?
I liked how the film made me
question what the human soul is and
how it asked a lot of important
questions about religion and rebirth.
The effects were good, but the story
and subtext were better.
Qualitative data gives us an in depth opinion back.

26. Quantitative data
Quantitative data gives us a measure of what
people think, in a statistical or numerical way.
Eg. If we asked the question
Did you like the film ‘Chappie’?
YES or NO (circle your answer)
YES NO

27. Quantitative versus Qualitative questioning
Which gives us a more useful answer for
deep analysis of peoples reactions to our
subject?

28. Quantitative versus Qualitative questioning
Which is easier to present in a graphical,
simple way?

29. Quantitative data
Gives us simple answers (and a simplified
version of what people think) meaning it is
easy to put into graphs and charts
It shows us what people
think about a subject but
doesn’t allow us to
understand why they
think that.

30. Quantitative data
Gives us in depth answers which allow us to
understand our audiences reactions, but it is
hard to put these complex results into
graphs and charts
It shows us what people
think about a subject but
doesn’t allow us to
understand why they
think that.

31. Making a good survey
1. Understand who your audience are.
What do we need to know about our audience?
• Age
• Gender
• Occupation
• Location
What type of question would be best to get this
data? Quantitative or qualitative?

32. For example
NAME _________________
AGE 16 – 18
19 – 25
25 – 30
30 – 50
50 – 65
65+
GENDER MALE FEMALE
PREFER NOT TO SAY
OCCUPATION ________________

33. Making a good survey
2. Understand what questions you need
answering
Eg. If you wanted to know if people would go
to see your film based on its idea alone,
what could you ask?

34. Making a good survey
3. Get a large enough sample of participants to
make it useful.
If you ask 20 people, and 19 of them are
teenagers your data will obviously state that
teenagers are your main market, when in fact
this is probably not true.
Ask a range of different people, of different
ages, genders and occupations to get a varied,
reliable sample.

35. Task 1
Working alone, log onto moodle and go to
the planning & research section.
Read the brief for Planning & Research
theory, and then continue to write out your
essay, using examples of your own
production work to prove all of the points
you are making.