there are a few things to talk about. for my research i wanted to look into something thats been on my mind for a while. and thats to do with fan reception of a specific TV show. the Tv show being ‘Warehouse 13′.
reallly, all i did was ask the one question, and that was, given the ratings per series, do you agree with what was found. and i asked fans. i did through a simple tumblr post, and managed to get a pretty large response in the day i left it going. really, it was a good start to find out some initial feelings, and it then opens up many avenues of thought to find out more about the reasons people gave their answers. things to look at, could be people who enjoyed different aspects of the content, find out whether there was much of a difference in declines of some content, while there being extra aspects being used instead. two of the main ideas that its making want to investigate, would be looking into whether its fans of certain characters/character relationships, that have differing opinions, or whether it was a universal fan hatred for the end of the show. the pros to this, is that its easy to take a quick, baseline of opinions, and find out whether a line of questioning is going to bear fruit or not. on the other hand, you’ve got no real meat to the bones of your investigation, and have to do more follow ups.
when looking at my own media habits, it was a very different kettle of fish. looking at that, there was no set up way of recording the information, then it was easiest for me to go by times and record what i did between times. It was an atypical day for me, but it still shows just how i kind of rely on technology. the pros to this, is that it gave me both numerical data, with times, and timings, but it also gives me a bit more information in the fact that there are words, and personalised information, into exactly how it works. the cons to this, are that its a very specific and only talking about the 1 person. a solution to that, is the data collation we did between the entire class, but again cons include possible atypical habits in a class of media students, instead of habits held by the general population, and that there are then possibly hundreds of different categories to work with. from this work though, it is interesting to look at both how my atypical interests change over time (what with some days i can not touch anything, and other days i can spend 10+hours gaming.)
i don’t think there is any one method that suits me best. it all depends on what kind of thing it is that i’m looking into, and how i need to analyse it.
