Qualitative Research

Qualitative Research is based on opinions, attitudes and preferences rather than hard facts and figures. Qualitative research produces information on people's opinions, views and preferences about something. Qualitative data is important to the media industry as it is used to find out what individuals and groups think and feel about a particular media product such as a new computer game, television programme or film. It is also used by advertisers to obtain people's responses to an advertising campaign.

Advantages of Qualitative Research. The first advantage is to provide depth and detail and looks deeper than analysing ranks and counts by recording attitudes, feelings and behaviours. Second advantage is to create openness by encouraging people to expand on their responses can open up new topic areas not initially considered. Another advantage is to simulates people's individual experiences and a detailed picture can be built up about why people act in certain ways and their feelings about these actions. Finally, the advantage is to attempts to avoid pre-judgements, if used alongside quantitative data collection, it can explain why a particular response was given.

Disadvantages of Qualitative Research. First disadvantage is usually fewer people studied, collection of qualitative data is generally more time consuming that quantitative data collection and therefore unless time, staff and budget allows it is generally necessary to include a smaller sample size. Second disadvantage is less easy to generalise because fewer people are generally studied it is not possible to generalise results to that of the population. Usually exact numbers are reported rather than percentages. Another disadvantage is that it is difficult to make systematic comparisons. For example, if people give widely differing responses that are highly subjective. Lastly, the disadvantage is dependent on skills of the researcher, particularly in the case of conducting interviews, focus groups and observation.

An example of qualitative research
Another example

The qualitative research is important to the media because they can hear their opinions and they can do something about it or not if they need to improve. For an example, the focus group can come and watch a film before it is released and they can give their opinions to them.