Evaluation
During this project I have used a number of different research techniques to find out more about illegal downloading. Some have been more useful than others. I found that I gained a lot more information using primary research methods such as interviews and focus groups than using secondary research methods such as internet or newspaper articles. I think this is because you can extract a lot more information from someone when you are face to face, you can ask them direct questions and follow on from their responses. This is a time consuming method of collecting information, however in some cases you can achieve far better results. Some forms of primary research can be very useful, for example someone could of conducted 50 interviews on your subject matter and posted their findings on the web, meaning you have information from 50 different individuals, without the workload. However secondary research like this is hard to come across.
A lot of the information I found I already knew, it was just a matter of going into further detail to find out certain statistics and hard facts. A lot of my secondary research was finding out different statistics, such as how much illegal downloading cost the music industry every year. I used 3 different search engines for my secondary research, Google, Yahoo and Ping, as some of them (Google) can be bias. I found very similar search results on all of the searches I did. Pretty much all of the online articles I found were writing arguments against illegal downloading and giving no real contrast, only focusing on how bad it is. This could be because many of the articles were written from a conservative viewpoint, as it is the media industries that are being hit hardest by illegal downloads, they may not want to portrait it in a positive way. Also I had to sift through lots of useless unreliable web pages before found a good reliable source, unless you find an article on a legitimate site such as Times Online, or Guardian, it is quite hard to find out how reliable a source is. A lot of my secondary sources were randomly found through searching things like “illegal downloading UK”. I think in future I need to refine my searches, targeting specific things I would like to find out. I did do this nearer the end of my secondary research, searching for “how much music was downloaded illegally in 2009”.
Doing my secondary research first was helpful as it gave me quite a clear idea of what questions I wanted to ask later in my study. It also allowed me to find specific things that I wanted to discuss further in my research.
We had to do three different forms of primary research, I chose to conduct a focus group, do an interview and an online questionnaire. I had three participants in my focus group excluding the group leader (Tasha) and myself who was documenting what was said. Aisha Thomas, Ruby Sulivan and Robbin Vans were my three participants, all three of them gave full answers to my questions and I gained a lot of relevant information from them, I think it was one of my most successful methods of research as each of them gave different responses and there was quite a lot of discussion and argument within the group. I tried to ask as many open questions as possible so as to encourage more discussion within the group, this worked well and some questions opened up debate between participants. There could have been a lot of improvements with my focus group. First of we had to do the focus group at the back of a class full of people so the participants were easily distracted. Because we were given such a short space of time to conduct one I was unable to find people of different demographics, which would have given the group a lot more contrast. Also we were only given around 15 minutes to conduct it, which was not nearly enough time, I think if we were given more time I could of collected a lot more information from them. In a real focus group it would have been a lot more structured and there would have been more time to discuss certain topics in depth. I was quite involved throughout the focus group, if there was something that I thought was relevant I would ask the participants to expand a bit further on it and maybe ask a few more questions. Because all of my participants were of the same age group I couldn’t really compare and contrast, which I would have liked to of done as I think it would have given my research a bit more depth.
I thought my interview went really well, I interviewed Steve Lewis who was one of the founders of Virgin Records, one of the biggest record labels of the late 80’s early 90’s. He gave me some really relevant and useful information, which I have used throughout my research. I wanted to get information from a legitimate well informed source and I am pleased that I managed to do so. Unfortunately due to his busy schedule I was only able to interview him for 15 minutes. I would have liked more time as I think I could have gotten a lot more information out of him. I recorded the interview on a small Dictaphone which enabled me to be fully engaged with the interview. I then typed the interview up and put it on the blog for later reference. Although the interview I got was really good it would of helped if I had more interviews, maybe from someone who benefited from illegal downloading, like an unsigned artists promoting themselves virally.
I made an online survey using survey monkey so as to collect some quantitative data for my research. I wanted to find out how many people downloaded illegally on a regular basis, and if any of these people have ever bought music from an online store. I think the questions I asked could of done with some improvement, maybe asking where they download from, if there are any specific website that are popular. However, survey monkey only allows you to ask 10 questions, which limits you to what you can ask. I sent out my questionnaire to 10 people, however only 6 completed it. This made my results unreliable as all of the percentages were bias, as more people from the age group 16 – 25 took the survey than people from other demographics. If I was to do it again I would send the questionnaire to more people so as to guarantee that I got some proper results that I could use in my research.
