HA1 Task 1 - Research Techniques

 

1: Quantitative Research:

Quantitative research is asking people for their opinions on something in a structured way and then you can produce hard facts and statistics off of them. But the way to get reliable results is to ask a fairly large number off people to compare their answers. You can ask questions like 'Have you played FIFA 14?' and 'did you like it?' so that you get their honest opinion. The questions that are asked are closed questions meaning That it should only be a one word answer.The way to produce quantitative research is to Talk to people (on the phone or in person), give them a questionnaire to fill out or do a survey. quantitative research is ideal for people wanting to find out out who, what, when and where on a question.Quantitative methods are ideally suited for finding out: who,what,when and where.

Here is an example of quantitative research. It shows a questionnaire asking people whether they would buy the Nintendo 3DS.

Here is some stats of quantitative research. It shows the age of the average gamer, the percent of US households that play video games and other facts about gaming.

2: Qualitative Research

This is where the researcher asks open questions which would then get answers that are detailed and are people's opinion. an example of a open question in the gaming industry would be like: What aspects of the game did you like? Or what about the game would you change? the way people normally get qualitative research is by a focus group or a face to face interviews.
qualitative researchers find this kind off research better because instead of giving a yes or no answer like quantitative they can get a more detailed answer which gives better research. It also helps because if they ask people what they think would make the game better they could listen to the answers and make the customers more happy and earn more money themselves so its a win, win.

This is a youtube clip called 'your mom hates dead space' which shows women reacting to the game dead space.

3: Audience Profiling

what is audience profiling?
Audience profiling is finding out the profile of your audience before hand so that you can put across your message to the right people to get the best result. probably including age and gender.
Audience profiling will be useful to game developers when they want to find who they are making the game for because they can get the age and gender of people that are interested in buying the game and spending some money on it.

Audience profiling is also a task all game publishers need to perform when creating a new product that they are going to put onto the market. these factors are to be considered whn defining an audience:

• Age, Gender, Race and Sexuality
• Education
• Occupation
• Annual Income
• Disposible Income
• Current Lifestyle/Aspiratinal or Desired Lifestyle
• Culture
• Media Interests
• Buying Habits
• Loyalty To Brands

Demographics:

A common and traditional method of audience profiling is known as Demographics. This defines the adult population largely by the work that they do.

The NRS social grade gives a certain letter code for 6 groups of people in the poulation. this describes the status and the income of the members of each group.




Psycographics:

This is the way of describing an audience by looking at their behaviour and personality traits.
Psycographics makes an assessment about their viewing and spending habits by labelling them.
A succesful psychographic profile was invented by a advertising agency named young and rubican it is known as their cross cultural consumer characterisation, based on abraham maslow's, hierachy of needs theory.

They put the audience into groups with labels that suggest their position in society.




Geodemographics:

Geodemographics segmentation is based on two simple principles:

people who are chosen at random are less likely to have similar characteristics than two people from the same place.

Places can be categorized in terms of the characteristics of the population which they contain.
Any two places can be placed in the same category, for example they contain similar types of people, even though they are widely seperated from each of the places.