Target Audience Research Analysis - Online Survey

Lewis Woods

This was my first question, How Old Are You? Admittedly, there were some mistakes that were later rectified in the paper hard-copy, such as missing out the ages 26 to 29 and repeating ages, 35-45 and 45-60. Disregarding this, my answers were as clear as the question can get, a large amount of people who took the survey are teenagers to young adults. This is positive and negative for different reasons. On one hand as my film is exploring the idea of teen homosexuality, having a teen audience will have more of an effect on a sympathetic and empathetic level. It is a common stereotype for teens to be sexually confused and therefore they can relate to having to face inner feelings and ridicule, which are issues in my short.

The Age Question.

The Ethnicity Question.

This question asked people of their ethnicity. As you can see, 100% of people are White, 94% being British and 6% being Other. The list of ethnicities was taken from a wikipedia article on the 2001 UK census. The ethnicity wasnt all too important, it was just to get an idea for who was answering and make the questionnaire more personal. The results were extremely one sided, with 100% of people being white.

The Sexuality Question.

This question is more obviously attached to my shorts theme. Looking at the results a large percentage, just over three quarters are heterosexual. Ideally I would have preferred more homosexuals or bisexual to have answered, but from the method of distribution that I used, there was no way I could have altered that. This demographic will have redeemed itself in a upcoming question.

The Location Question.

This question is the first part of research into class and status of my demographic. By looking at the most common locations that people live in and then combining that with the next question, I can make an assumption towards the class and status of the people who took part in the questionnaire.

The Residential Question.

Out of the 17 responses, 16 lived in a house. Adding up the amount of bedrooms and bathrooms and dividing it by the number of responses, we can get an average house size for the responses. 48 bedrooms / 16 houses = 3/house 21 bathrooms / 16 houses = 1.3/house The average house size of the responders are three bedroom and one bathroom (two every three houses). Using this information, disregarding the one person who lives in a flat, alongside the knowledge that 71% of people live in Surrey, a county that has the highest GDP per capita of any county in England, we can go ahead and assume the people responding to my questionnaire are mostly above working class, around the lower-middle to middle-class area.

The Social Realism Question.

From these results we can see that a slight majority are familiar with the term social realism. This will help when showing the film as they will be expecting the conventions of the genre and not be disappointed by not understanding what type of film it is. Roughly a quarter said that they have heard of the genre, giving me the opportunity to take them into it with my film and increasing their enjoyment by seeing a quality film of this genre which they have merely heard of.

The Viewing Question.

This graph tells me that Youtube and Vimeo are widely used resources for watching short films. The idea of this question was half to get a feel for the appropriate place to upload my short and half to get an idea for the amount of people which view short films in general. Now, based on previous questions, I can assume that most of these people are not watching social realism shorts. But this is fine as mentioned previously because it gives me the chance to open up this genre for my demographic.

The Important Question.

This question is appropriately labelled the important question because it boils down to whether my film will be worth making after the people doing the interview have made their decision. Luckily, I got a landslide of the answer yes with 82% of people saying that they would be interested in watching a film of my genre and content. This question was not disguised in anyway and flat out asks Would you be interested in a short film about teen homosexuality?. This allows me to conclude that my film would be a good idea to make and lets me move on to the last question asking about the issues that they would expect to see.

The Issue Question

Number of words I would consider asPositive = 2 Negative = 9 Neutral = 8

When studying the graph of responses, if you ignore neutral words such as age and feelings, there is a large ratio of negative to positive words. This tells me that the majority of people believe that a social realism text about homosexuality would have dark undertones and themes. This helps me to see that the majority of the people who responded would know what to expect. Although that may look like a downside, it also gives me insight to what the viewers want to see in my short film, even if it is quite negative. As you can see, words like Bullying and Acceptance and Moral Issues and Prejudice/ Discrimination are closely tied to the number of responses that said them. This tells me that although the audience would find interest in a movie where there is homophobic bullying, there is an equal amount of people who would like to see a happy ending or some sort of revelation within the text.