Evaluation question 3

Evaluation question 3
Because it takes time to gather audience feedback, we're going to start with question 3.



Question 3 - What have you learned from your audience feedback?

In order to do this question, you need to have already done some audience research and gained audience feedback!

Viable and appropriate audience research methods at this level... are always going to be qualitative (To undertake quantitative research would require vast amounts of time and money and still not be as useful or revealing as qualitative methods.) Therefore, questionnaires, whereby you ask ten of your friends whether they liked it or not and then provide the percentage of the number who thought it was good, is not an appropriate strategy.

So what can you do?

You could use Facebook, a discussion group, or even a face to face discussion with the target audience, or ideally more than one of these. You must always consider the questions you want to ask very carefully and be prepared to prompt your audience further than they want to go. Ideally you would have a conversation with the target audience about your work rather than mechanically writing down first responses. Don't just ask them if they like it. You could ask things like:

- what happens in the narrative?

- does the performance look convincing?

- does it remind you of any other music videos or other texts?

- would you like to be friends with the people in the video?

- what genre of music do you think the video is appropriate for?

- if you could change one thing, what would it be?

- you can think of some other questions too

However you do the research, you'll need to discuss what you learned from the feedback.

In your blog post, you'll need to:

1. Explain what you did for audience research, perhaps embedding a video of a focus group or print screening some responses from your Facebook group.

2. Summarise, discuss and analyse your feedback. These are some questions you might like to answer for this bit.

How have they been affected by the text? (In expected ways, or in unexpected ways?)
What uses do they appear to be making of the texts? (You will need to ask this one in a clever way – they won't understand this as a direct question)
How are the target audience reading the text?
What sort of cultural capital are they using to help make sense of text?
What sort of pleasures are being offered by your texts?
After this, you will need to consider how you might alter your work (hypothetically) as a result of this feedback.


A2 work needs to apply theory to get a good grade - so use some of the key terms here. You have some work on theories of audience on your blog from last term. Look again at this to remind yourself what all this means. If you can't find them, the relevant handouts are in Student Dept Files.

Key terms

Direct effect

Hypodermic needle theory

Cultural Studies Approach – negotiated, oppositional, preferred readings.

Pleasure – what kinds of pleasure does the text offer?

Cultural Capital

Quantitative and Qualitative feedback.


Some theory links

http://www.mediaknowall.com/alevkeyconcepts/audience.html

http://www.mediaknowall.com/as_alevel/Advertising/advertising.php?pageID=research

Qualitative versus Quantitative research - http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Students/aeo9702.html