Unit 6:Task 1

Audience research is always extremely important and that is no exception when it comes to the political campaign. Political parties must understand their audience in order to win them over, discover what their views and ultimately win their votes.

Quantitative research:

Quantitative audience research is information that is gathered from an audience and portrayed as numerical data. Quantitative research is about numbers and what they represent, these numbers can help you learn a lot about your audience. This research may include things like viewership numbers and ratings these facts and figures can be useful to a presidential campaign as the parties can see from previous televised debates how many viewers they get and who the viewers are, meaning they can tailor their questions and answers around the majority of the viewers. 

Quantitative research can be done by turning the audiences opinions into numerical data when asking the audience a particular question the answers can be turned into numbers. For example audiences may be asked to rate a certain statement from 1 to 5 depending on how strongly they agree with that statement, this rating system helps make the research easier to analyse as all the data as turned into and easy to understand set of figures. Political parties can use research like this to see how the general public agrees with their policies and find out what percentage of the average population rates their policies highly.

Qualitative research:

Qualitative audience research is about the content of the research itself and not just the statistical information, what this means is that qualitative research focuses more on the answers that are given to the questions that are presented. This research can be used to find out exactly what an audience wants and what their opinions are on matters, it is less so used to make graphs and present statistics unlike quantitative research. Methods of this type of research include focus groups, questionnaires and interviews.

During the political campaign it is vital that the parties conduct thoroughly both types of research. Qualitative research is important as it allows you to find out exactly what your audience wants on a much more personal bases. Answers are more tailored to the individual who is answering the questionnaire or taking part in the focus group allowing whoever uses the research to get a better understanding of each audiences members wants and needs. In a presidential campaign it is important for the parties to know the wants and needs of their audience in order to capture their votes, they must pander to their audience in order to make sure their support can be guaranteed. 

If the parties conduct their research correctly before events such as political debates they have a much better chance of appealing to their audiences.

Audience Classifications

Grouping audiences into categories can make you have a better understanding of them. For example psychographics is the understanding of audience and their values, including grouping them together based on their personality, interests, opinions and lifestyles. An example of using psychographics would be to group audience members by their lifestyle, putting them into groups based on which socio-economic class they fall into. Audiences can be grouped into; working, middle and upper class. This information can be used to understand common trends between socio-economic groups, for example whether or not there is a correlation between peoples attitudes to politicals ie; which party they are in favour of and their socio-economic background.