Primary Research In order to determine the audience for my final major project I have conducted primary research through a survey consisting of 6 questions which distributed via the social media outlet Facebook therefore providing me with feedback relating to my idea from a range of different people. Are you male or female? Firstly I asked what gender the participant was due to the fact that I was curious weather this particular idea would appeal more to one specific gender. Although I tried to gain an equal number of male and female participants, as you can see from the graph above 60% of the people who answered were female and the remaining 40% were male. What is your age? The second question I asked was in regards to the participants age, again due to the fact that I was curious as to weather or not my idea would appeal more to a specific age range. As you can see from the graph above 60% of the participants were aged between 15 to 19, 30% were aged between 20 to 25 and the remaining 10% were aged over 40. Do you or someone close to you suffer from a mental illness? The reason for asking this particular question was due the fact that not only was I curious to find out how common mental illnesses are but also to determine weather or not having a mental illness themselves or being close to someone who has one would increase their interest in this particular idea and weather the idea would also appeal to those who are not familiar with mental health illnesses.
Transcript
Primary Research
In order to determine the audience for my final major project I have conducted primary research through a survey consisting of 6 questions which distributed via the social media outlet Facebook therefore providing me with feedback relating to my idea from a range of different people.
Are you male or female?Firstly I asked what gender the participant was due to the fact that I was curious weather this particular idea would appeal more to one specific gender.
Although I tried to gain an equal number of male and female participants, as you can see from the graph above 60% of the people who answered were female and the remaining 40% were male.
What is your age?The second question I asked was in regards to the participants age, again due to the fact that I was curious as to weather or not my idea would appeal more to a specific age range.
As you can see from the graph above 60% of the participants were aged between 15 to 19, 30% were aged between 20 to 25 and the remaining 10% were aged over 40.
Do you or someone close to you suffer from a mental illness?The reason for asking this particular question was due the fact that not only was I curious to find out how common mental illnesses are but also to determine weather or not having a mental illness themselves or being close to someone who has one would increase their interest in this particular idea and weather the idea would also appeal to those who are not familiar with mental health illnesses.
As you can see from the chart above 90% of people who answered this survey either had a mental illness or are close to someone who does in contrast to a small 10% who are not familiar with mental health illnesses. These results suggest that mental health illnesses are a lot more common than people think and therefore this particular idea is tackling something which over the years has become increasingly more common, although not many people tend to talk about it.
What do you think about the idea of a photography project which will feature images portraying what it is like to live with a mental illness?I then asked this question in order to determine weather the factors i established in the previous questions, gender, age and familiarity with mental health would effect how they feel about this particular project therefore enabling me to establish the audience for my project.
50% of people responded that this idea was a very good idea, all of which were aged between 19 - 25 and were both male and female, as goes for the 40% of people who responded that this was a good idea, therefore suggesting that this particular idea doesn't just appeal to one specific gender and in fact appeals to both. 10% of the people who responded answered OK, therefore suggesting that they are least interested in this idea in contrast to the people who selected very good or good.
What I found interesting about these results is that the people who answered OK were the same participants that had selected that they did not or was not close to someone who suffered from a mental illness for example:
This to me suggests that my particular idea will appeal more to people who are familiar with mental illnesses in someway, maybe due to the fact that they are more likely to be able to relate to the images personally.
Would photography tackling mental health interest you?
When asked weather or not photography tackling mental health interests you? 305 of the people answered no with the remaining 70% answering yes. Again what I found interesting is that 10% of the 30% of people who answered no were the same 10% who selected that they had not suffered themselves or close to anyone who has suffered, again anchoring the fact that my final major project will appeal more to those who are familiar with mental health illnesses. Another thing I found was that another 10% of the 30% who answered no were all aged 40+ therefore meaning that everyone who answered yes were aged ranged between 15 and 25 suggesting that this particular idea appeals more to a younger demographic rather than an older one.
What would you expect to see from an image tackling mental health? Finally I asked this question in order to gain a variety of answers enabling me to understand what the audience themselves would expect to see from the images I intend to produce, below are a few of the answers I received:
Therefore I will take all these comments in consideration when producing my images.
