NEA: Research Rationale

For my music magazine my target audience are 14-18 year olds. This is convenient as I am in a secondary school with a sixth form; therefore I have access to an even wider age range of 11-18 year olds. This will allow me to not only view the preferences of my desired target audience when doing my audience research but also to younger viewers who may also be intrigued to my product in the future.

The type of research I am going to conduct will be both quantitative and qualitative in order to gain a variety of results to work with. This will allow me to not only create a magazine with key features and styles my audience prefers but it will also allow me to create the desired atmosphere and vibe of my product. I will do this by conducting observational research in order to also view a physical reaction to a range of already established magazines. However a negative aspect of this would be that I would only have qualitative opinions from a small group due to timing and how people’s opinions may change when they know they are being observed. Due to this I will also conduct quantitative research on a bigger scale to gain ideas from a larger audience range, doing this online will be more efficient as nearly everyone has access to the internet, it will also make the results quicker to access. 

When doing the actual audience research I intend to start off by conducting an online survey in order to gain a rough idea of the music preferences and magazine preferences of my target audience. I will send off surveys to those within the age range I am aiming at via social media platforms. After gaining the data, I will analyse it to see key choices made. Following this I will conduct a focus group interview based on the feedback. In the interview I will present forth magazines associated with the main interests from the online survey. This will allow me to view physical actions (facial expressions) towards the products presented. I will also ask questions which go into more depth about the questions I previously asked, finding out why people may have chosen certain answers.