Research Method Blog Post #12

Audience Research Methods

Blog Post #12

How do we measure media audiences?

We measure media audiences in various ways, some methods can be to analyse sales, subscriptions, rating and figures.

Who measures audiences?

National Readership Study: The National Readership Study (NRS) was established in 1956 and today provides the most authoritative and valued audience research in use for print advertising in the UK. The survey itself covers 250 of Britain's major newspapers and magazines, showing the size and nature of the audiences they achieve.

Broadcasters' Audience Research Board: The Broadcasters' Audience Research Board (BARB) is the organisation responsible for providing the official measurement of UK television audiences. BARB is responsible for providing estimates of the number of people watching television. This includes which channels and programmes are being watched, when they are watched and the type of people who are watching at any one times.

http://www.nrs.co.uk/
http://abc.go.com/
http://www.barb.co.uk/

Considering Audience:

Audience engagement - This describes how an audience interacts with a media text. Different people react in different ways to the same text.

Audience expectations: These are the ideas the audience have in advance of seeing a media text. This particularly applies to genre pieces. Don't forget producers continually play with or shatter audiences expectations.



New Media:

New media is often used to target audiences so that they can measure the audience itself for example;
Facebook 'Like' and Twitter 'Retweet' and 'Trends'
Online forums - Comment tools
Views on YouTube & Google +1

Methods of Research:

When it comes to research there are two main types of research:

1) Quantitative Research: This is mainly focused on statistics and numerical data which means that it is number based, the questions are closed which means that a person can give a certain type of answer, this is to generate exact answers which furthermore means that it is very factual.

2) Qualitative Research: This is mainly focused on description and verbal communication, this can include various methods such as interviews and focus groups, this can mean that they can analyse existing products to see if it will fit in the market. It also consists of open questions which means that there can be multiple types of answers if the same question is asked to different people this gives us an assumption and to generate answers open to interpretation.