Research Report

For this unit i am writing a report to explain the purposes and methods of research. I will be talking about the advantages and disadvantages to the different types of research while also talking about my own personal experiences using these types of research.

There are 2 main types of research primary and secondary research. Primary research is where you use questionnaires, interviews and surveys to get information from members of the public in the hope of getting information to either support a claim your trying to make or to find out a target audience. Secondary research takes other peoples information whether its from books or even wikipedia and uses it to get data and figures to go towards your information.

During my time on this course i have created my own primary research this has been through creating  surveys that people can answer so that i can use the information towards a report. I feel that primary research can be extremely helpful because if you are trying to create a product or find out more about the product one of the most important things to find out is what your target audience will be. Questionnaires/surveys are arguably the best way to do this because you are getting actual answers from the people themselves. I have found this really handy when finding out information for my course project. There are disadvantages for example sometimes the person answering the survey may not be interested in the topic your trying to cover meaning you don't gather much information. One other drawback could be people not giving complete answers meaning you don't get all the information you need for your work.

This is a screenshot of my video game questionnaire i also did a survey for Levis both questionnaires have helped greatly with finding out what my final project will be and what will be my target audience. In my last course me and a group of other students did a focus group to get meeting notes towards our own ideas for a mobile phone app this allowed us to keep our meetings saved away and used as a tool so that we could go back to and get information from for our paper work. The only drawback to this is that there is a lot of pressure so sometimes when speaking you could mess up the information meaning that you will have to start again. Another problem is the recording equipment can be complicated to use.

In terms of secondary research i have used a variety of websites to get information related to the work i must complete. Secondary research is a big positive in that there is a massive amount of information you can get from secondary research such as history and viewing figures. For my Levis assignment i have done secondary research to find out about the 501 campaign i went on the main site to get history and sales figures. The site i went on is official so all information is true and updated. A drawback is that other sites information can be out of date or even not true so the best advice is to find official reliable sites.

Survey Report

For this unit we created a survey on our own specific themes and then allowed my classmates to fill out the survey. The information that i have received from this will be used as inspiration for my own magazine front cover design. The theme that I chose to cover is video games as being a writer in the video games industry is something that I would love to do for a career one day.

I asked a total of 10 questions in my survey. I attempted to cover both the print side of video game journalism (magazines) and the digital side too (blog sites and websites) this is so that i had a good idea on how important each form was. I also asked questions about there own personal video game experiences so i could find out what sort of video games should be showcased mainly whether its hardcore games or more mainstream games to fit the casual audience. 

The results

The first thing i wanted to find out was how big people are into video games and out of the information i got i found out that the majority was just casual gamers playing now and again while a couple of people who filled out my survey was massively into video games and another was in the middle loves playing video games but not too seriously. This was a expected result as we are in a busy time in our lives so finding time to play video games is getting harder to do. Other information I found out was that a majority was into action games like call of duty but there was still a audience for role playing games and i also found out that people are still into retro games just as much as modern games. 

The main information I wanted to find out though was how many people actually read magazines these days and from the feedback I got back it suggests that a large amount of young people don't read magazines with only one person saying that they do read them. This again is expected because we are moving into a digital age so print information is beginning to become a less used form of information. I found that in fact some people occasionally check out gaming websites for reviews and news instead of magazines. The benefits to this is that websites are regularly updated and most importantly they are free to use. A large amount of users check out mainstream video game sites such as IGN that also covers movies and comic books. 

So in conclusion the results have allowed me to conclude that gaming magazines and magazines as a general form of information is not as widely used as it once was. Gaming websites are now the main place to go for information and reviews it offers the same stuff but digitally and for free. This will greatly help me when it comes to working on my final magazine design I know what themes I should cover and what video games I should include. I also through the feedback will find a way to incorporate a gaming website into my magazine design.