What I have Learnt from Audience Feedback

A focus group is the most grass-roots way you can learn about the media business. By gathering a select group of regular people together, you can find out how your company is perceived versus your competition. The answers you get can be a road map as you build your brand.

The advantages of using a focus group is that:

• The researcher can interact with the participants, pose follow-up questions or ask questions that probe more deeply, this means that as researchers we can gain a deeper meaning behind what people say.
• Another advantage is that Results can be easier to understand than complicated statistical data, in numerical form, as this is complicated to work with and is hard to put into practise.
• The researcher can also get information from non-verbal responses, such as facial expressions or body language, which adds a deeper understanding to what the participants are saying.
• The Information is also provided more quickly than if people were interviewed separately.­

However the downsides of using a focus group include:

• The small sample size means the groups might not be a good representation of the larger population.
• Group discussions can be difficult to steer and control, so time can be lost to irrelevant topics.
• Respondents can feel peer pressure to give similar answers to the moderator's questions.

Qualitative research gathers information that is not in numerical form. For example, open ended questionnaires, unstructured interviews and observations. 

Qualitative data is typically descriptive data and as such is harder to analyse than quantitative data.

Qualitative research is useful to studies at the individual level, and to find out, in depth, the ways in which people think or feel.

Analysis of qualitative data is difficult and requires accurate description of participant responses, for example, sorting responses to open questions and interviews into broad themes.

Quantitative research gathers data in numerical form, which can be put into categories or in rank order, or measured in units of measurement. This type of data can be used to construct graphs and tables of raw data.