Audience Research

During our audience research task, we gave fifteen people (aged 15-18) a questionnaire with ten questions. These questions appeared relevant to our project and helped us to also get an idea of the interests of our potential demographic.

We asked a mixture of qualitative and quantitative based questions; qualitatively asked questions allowed us to get an understanding of ‘why' our consumer chose their answer in depth, whereas the quantitatively asked questions helped us to collect and examine a relationship between different/similar responses.

Two of the ten questions that we asked included 6 and 9 were ‘What is your favourite psychological thriller (if you watch them) and explain why?’ And ‘In your opinion what makes a psychological thriller different to other thrillers’ respectively. Both of these are examples of qualitative research allowing the consumer to state the reason behind their answer.

When we asked ‘What is your favourite psychological thriller (if you watch them) and explain why?’ and the responses we got were as expected, different among others. Answers included The Number 23, The Silence of the Lambs, Psycho, V for Vendetta, Scream and Basic Instinct as people’s favorite psychological thriller and reasons behind their chosen answer were because they had puzzling narratives and because it allowed them to put themselves in the characters position. When we asked ‘In your opinion what makes a psychological thriller different to other thrillers’ Answers included that they focused more on the mental state of the character rather than the narrative and some insisted that they were in fact even more scarier than other thrillers.

From this information we can interpret into our final piece and now we have a great understanding of what interests our particular target audience. We have to also make sure the film we make meets the conventions of a psychological thriller and not get to mired on the consumer response and not meeting the task needs. Overall we found the responses useful and helpful, and our group now feels more confident about what is expected.