Exclusive: Early survey results for young people's cinema-going habits
- 97% of films downloaded are illegal
- 10% of films viewed are non-mainstream
- 45% are sastisfied with choice of films available at cinema
Brendant Tate, for Newcastle College and Hello Ideas, has compiled the early results of his survey into cinema-going habits amongst young people and students. Published for the first time on Netribution, the results comee from 75 face-to-face interviews, and will hopefully exist in an online form here soon.
“Asking questions is widely accepted as a cost efficient way, of gathering information of past behaviour and experiences, private actions and motives, and beliefs, values, and attitudes.” (Foddy, 1994)
On the following page are some diagrams, which represent the results from the questionnaire, which I distributed as part of the market research for my event. The market research is on going; these results are based on the answers from 75 questionnaires. I hope to be able to report on my final findings with twice the amount of data. The sample group has been taken from outside the Newcastle University, Newcastle College media department, in Marco Polo restaurant, and in the R&B workplace. This has given me a sample group that represents males, females, students and full-time workers equally, with ages ranging from 19 to 50.
The sample group is made up of people all geographically positioned around the Newcastle area. This is because I am primarily interested in the people of Newcastle’s attitudes and engagement with film and cinema going.
This survey was administered face-to-face. Bourque (2003) states the advantages of administering questionnaires in this way are, “The interviewer is available to answer questions”, “Confidentiality is maximised”, and says that they “Provide in-depth data on the answerability of questions”.
Overall I was very surprised at how few people watched independent (indie) films. It occurred to me that as they often don’t gain the same publicity as the latest Hollywood blockbusters, people are probably more reserved about spending their money to go and see a film they have never heard of.
I was interested to see that 45% of people asked didn’t think their local cinemas showed the films they wanted to see. Was it that they were just being negative? Or did they genuinely feel that their cinemas couldn’t offer them exciting original films which they would pay to go and see?
The results of this questionnaire clearly shows people are dissatisfied with the cost of a ticket at their local cinema. I think it will be important to do some market research to discover what local cinemas are charging. Then it will be useful to offer customers better value on the price of their ticket when they go to see an indie film.
The answer to question 8 was a resounding ‘Yes’, this shows that clearly people are open to the idea of having other elements introduced to their cinema experience in order to enhance the experience.
It seems that all the options of alternative leisure experiences were very popular. However nobody added any other options in the ‘other’ box. I think it is safe to assume that people do have other activities they engage in however going for a drink and attending a live music performance were activities selected by over 75% of people.
Here we can see that for the majority of people, paying to download a film is not something they would consider, when films are readily available for free from the World Wide Web. An interesting statistic from the questionnaire was that 60% of students regularly download/stream films from the web compared with only 35% of people in full-time employment.