The document discusses audience theories and research conducted to understand audience preferences for documentaries. It describes theories by Burton, Maslow and Dyer on how audiences can be categorized and why they are drawn to certain media. It then details research using a focus group to understand what type of documentaries people prefer in terms of style, narrative structure and presenters. The results found people generally prefer documentaries with a presenter on screen and a quest narrative structure.

1. Audience

2. Secondary Audience theories Burton – Who is the audience? Burton is a theorist that came up with the idea that an audience can be broken down into social and media grouping. Hartley and Fiske split this social group further into categories such as religion and region. Maslow – Why the audience? Maslow created the hierarchy of needs, which can be applied to all form of media. He mentions that an audience get involved with a medium because they are missing something in their life (their needs). This fits into the lest important need at the top, which is self actualization. For example an audience could be feeling bored so they are in need of some creative art to intrigue them. Richard Dyer This theorist suggested that audiences flock to a medium because of an opposing behaviour they are missing, like if you are feeling lonely you will want to get involved with a genre that makes you feel like a community. Like the isolation and community pair there are many other.

3. Relevance of narrative and audience theories The narrative theories are useful as we can know put forward these theories in a focus group to see what they like best, and as we have researched them we understand them and can inform the focus group of what we know. Burtons grouping is relevant to making our documentary as we can narrow down our target audience so we know who to focus out documentary on before we make it. The audience theories like Maslow are useful too as they enable us to get an insight what to give to the audience, what to give to fulfil their needs.

4. Audience research What we aim to do: Find out what type of documentary people wish to watch. What style they like. Whether they like presenters or not. We will conduct the research in the style of a focus group. This means we will get a group of people who are as diverse as they could be and ask them a series of questions and record their answers. We will try not to be biased and ask open questions, we will also show for our extract, alternative documentary genres, one political and one social (conspiracy theory and drugs). What we will ask: What was the last documentary you had enjoyed watching? What type of documentary do you prefer? (sub genre) Would you like a presenter to be on screen, off screen (voice) or do you have no preference? Do you like a quest/journey narrative structure in documentaries? (i will give examples) Now you have watched an extract from a documentary, what did you like about it? And what did you dislike about it? How will we do it?

5. Audience research – results - Quantitative This result exposes that the documentary viewing audience prefer a presenter to be on screen. This goes hand in hand with the quest narrative structure, however you can have a voice over trying to work/find something out. The result of this question reveals that many people like the new quest narrative structure. It seems to be the trend this era with rising stars like Justin lee Collins, however due to the fact cameras can be smaller now they can be taken around more. Which has enabled quest narrative structure documentaries to appear more often, and clearly the public enjoy them.

6. Audience research – results - Qualitative “ i like a documentary with humour” “ Its good when there's a mystery, when they, like, try to work things out” “ I prefer documentaries on politics” “ I don’t mind if celebrities are in a documentary or not, i still watch it if I'm interested” “ Time team on CH 4” “ True life stories on CH 5” “ you know when a documentaries good, because you keep on watching it and don't wonder what's on another channel” “ I think the voice of the person on the documentary is very important” “ Oh no. I'm the opposite i watch documentaries about celebrities often, i love a bit of gossip” “ I'm really boring i like the old history ones, because i find them interesting”

7. Audience research – results - Qualitative Below is the focus groups view to the controversial documentary as well as their views on the socially vibrant documentary about drugs. Displaying it in a like-dislike table as shown is good as i need to focus on what to construct and what not to construct for my product. Like Dislike The mystery of it all. Interesting, and lots to watch. The documentary was straight to the point in the intro. The music was good and relevant to the subject matter. Representing facts in a biased way. Annoying voice of the presenter.( not inviting) Could not relate to the subject matter in any way so felt not involved. Boring and slow paced intro (over 3 mins before the titles sequence).

8. Audience research -conclusion For the research for our documentary we had to select people that fitted our target audience and ask them questions to do with our product. By choosing our target audience we are giving our feedback high validity, this would not be the case if for example we chose 6 year olds interested in “Barbie”. We used a focus group and this ended up being a good decision as it allowed the participants to speak out and view their opinions. The fact they were with people may also cause them to feel comfortable and give us their feedback, however we was careful to avoid conformity. To stop this prior to the Focus group we told the participants a white lie by saying “This is for our own documentary so be truthful please” . This also applied for demand characteristics that we avoided, but what also helped was the wording of our questions. They were always open ended and had words in like “personally” to get a personal response. we decided to have a mix of qualitative and quantitative data so we can present our data in mathematical way, to present a clear understanding and result while on the other hand have quotes for detailed feedback. We made sure for the Quantitative questions to have a scale of even numbers to eliminate the sit-on-the-fence option.