Audience Research

The objective of quantitative research is to quantify data and generalise the information gathered to the rest of the demographic.

Quantitative research uses a large number of people to represent the population of interest. The sample will often be randomly selected. the data gathered will be analysed in graphs and charts. the data from this will be useful and conclusive but does not go into detail like qualitative research.

Qualitative research uses much fewer people to gather its data but will get very detailed answers. It looks more at the reasons for customer behaviour than what they do or do not buy. The problems with this type of research are that the group tested are not representative of the population and the answer found can be debatable.

Three types of sampling:

Random sampling - In this method the population are all given numbers and then a random number generator picks the numbers and will decide who will be asked the questions.

Systematic random sampling - In this method everyone in the population is numbers and then every nth person is selected to be questioned.

Stratified random sampling - this is when the population is split into smaller groups depending on characteristics like sex, age, ethnicity, social status etc...