Qualtitative Research

Qualitative Research provides information on opinions, views and thoughts on something - rather than facts and figures. Looking at how media producers carry out this research is important.

For example, focus groups. Focus groups are very popular as they allow the producer to gain direct feedback from a small group of individuals.
Also, questionnaires also allow for specific targeting of certain sectors of the audience and means that very precise and targeted questions can be asked.
Face to Face interviews can be time consuming, but are beneficial as they allow the interviewer to get a reaction off of the interviewee.

There are of course advantages and disadvantages of this kind of research:

 Advantages of Qualitative research are,
- It provides depth and detail on attitudes, feelings and behaviours.
- It creates openness which encourages people to expand on their responses
- A detailed picture can be built up about why people act in certain ways and their feelings about these actions

A few disadvantages are that,
- It can take a lot of time to gather all of the information together, and then read through all of the results to find something useful to your study.
- It takes a lot of time to generalise
- Also, fewer people are often studied in this kind of research.