FIRST RESEARCH LESSON (methods) 8th september

There are two different types of resarch, primary and secondary. primary, directly finding the source of information for yourself. this could be through surveys, focus groups, direct contact with producers of the media, chat rooms, observation (empirical research)...etc. focus groups gather opinions of products (e.g. films/clothes) from an audience.the creators of the products then alter it acordingly. one on one interviews can be more effective than focus groups as the interviewee will not be swayed by others opinions and more in deapth questions can be asked. Secondary research indicates sources of information which are supplied by someone else finding the information before you. for example the internet (media gardian), newspapers (telegraph technology section), the radio, podcasts or a non fiction book.
it is useful to use more than one method of research as you get more acurate information. using just one source is likely to be biased.

content analysis

we carried out a research activity which involved looking at if magazines represent ethnic minorities fairly. our group counted the number of white people in 'Style' magazine and compared it to the number of people from ethnic minoroties which were pictured. we found that there were over 200 white people featured in the magazine, and only around 12 who were not. as we were not givern precise instructions on how to carry out the research, different groups approached it in different ways. as well as counting the number of people representing each race, we looked at which models were the most dominant on the pages. for example, the front cover model was a white celebrity and other races were did not appear on the pages untill at least 15 pages into the magazine. Also the people pictured from ethnic minorities were often printed smaller and maybe in the background of the image. to improve our research we would need to decide on a collection of specific variables we were going to take into acount. should we count each nationality seperatly or split it into just two sections, white and other? also we noticed that almost 100% of the adverts contained white models. adverts are suppose to represent how people should aspire to be. does this make the magazine and our society subconciously racist?
Our technique to collect the quantative data involved counting the people on every page. as the magazine hase over 200 pages, this was quite tedious. Another argument is that the images should represent the nationalities in the UK. as there is only around 7.5% of ethnic minorities the country this obviously means that the majority of the models will be white, however it does not mean they should be bigger and more glamorous on every page.