Audience Research

The objective of qualitative research is that it aims to gain an understanding of peoples underlying reasons and motivations. They sample a small number of people that may not be representative but they fulfil a given quota. They collect data by individual interviews that help produce a lot of detail. In the analysis only key themes are identified. The outcomes of this type of research are debatable but go into a lot of detail.

The objective of quantitative research is to quantify results and generalise those results to a population of interest. The sample is usually randomly selected and usually a large number of people. The collection process is structured techniques such as questionnaires. In the analysis, statistical graphs and charts are used. The outcomes of this research are usually conclusive but go into little detail.

The 3 types of sampling methods are:

Simple random sample - where you get a sampling frame, give them numbers and choose who to use using a random number generator.

Systematic random sample - assign everyone a number e.g 1-5 then every nth number is selected.

Stratified random sample - people are put into groups then a group is chosen to use depending on sex, age, ethnicity, sexuality, disability and so on.

We will use simple random sampling and systematic random sampling to see who will answer our questionnaires and we will use a stratified random sampling to find out who we will be interviewing.

We chose these ways because we thought that we would be able to get quantitative data from our questionnaires and qualititative answers from our interviews. We chose systematic random sampling because it gives us a lot of people to answer our questions and it also gives us more of a chance to get a more diverse opinions on what our trailer should show and what they thought would be the best elements to show.

We chose stratified random sampling for our interviews because it allows us to select a small amount of people to fill our quota. We will have a mixture of males and females from all ethnicitys and this again would provide us with a lot of different opinions into what people think what is important in both a horror and christmas trailer.

Reference
http://www.coventry.ac.uk/ec/~nhunt/meths/index.html - More information on the different types of sampling.