I searched the web for relevant academic articles and soon found the problem was not lack of information but rather how to select what was actually useful. I realised that simply typing in ‘popular music and youth culture’ would just produce millions of mostly irrelevant results. I did two things to find information on the web; firstly I refined my search phrases by constantly identifying what produced relevant pages and continually modifying my searches to produce more and more relevant results. I also used Boolean operators to make my searches specific and relevant. For example, I always placed ‘media technologies’ and ‘new media technologies’ in inverted commas so that the phrase was kept together.
The internet is an immensely vast resource, which, once tamed, can be an excellent research tool. The internet’s vastness is mainly due to it being unrestricted. However, this also means that we must always be wary of internet content. When using the internet, I always recorded who was producing the material and for what purpose.
By this point I had reached a stage in my project where there was little more I could learn from secondary research. I decided to produce a questionnaire. I started by identifying what I wanted to find out and then devised a number of questions to try and identify the recipient’s social identity and their media consumption habits. When writing my questionnaire I tried to make the questions open ended but not leading. I piloted this questionnaire by giving it to two of my classmates. I was happy with their interpretations of, and answers to my questions. I made a few minor adjustments and handed out 50 copies to people around school. My sampling was limited to one school and comprised mostly of my year group but within these boundaries was fairly random.
While my questionnaires produced some interesting information on media consumption they did not provide very detailed answers. I hastily arranged a small focus group of four 18 year old and one 17 year old. The focus was short (about 15 min) and informal (in a bed room). I used a video camera to film the group, I predicted that a camera would make people feel self conscious, so left it running a while before I started to ask them questions, in this time we all chatted and soon every one was relaxed and had forgotten about the camera. I asked questions and allowed answers to develop into conversations but soon everyone was completely off the point and I had to steer the conversation in the direction I wanted it. Filming the group was extremely helpful as it allowed me to consider people’s body language whilst carrying out a discourse analysis on the group.
I interviewed Mr. Vanstratten, a new teacher at school who has been working in the new media industry for over 10 years. Although most of what we talked about was largely irreverent I gained a valuable and interesting insight to the media industry, and how it is changing.
Towards the end of my research time it started to become apparent that I needed to extend my research on multichannel TV. I decided to survey people watching music channels on multichannel TV. I simply asked two people to watch multichannel TV, whilst I filmed the TV screen in each case. I feel this was very successful technique. The camera was not watching the viewer, and the viewers seemed very unphased by its presence, it was quickly forgotten about all together. The technique gave me a good understanding of how this format is consumed.
Overall, I used a range of primary and secondary methods of research, which yielded both quantative and qualative data. I used these methods to gain academic, popular cultural and audience research, and each had their disadvantages and advantages.
