Questionnaire responses

I posted my questionnaire onto Twitter and Facebook. By using Facebook I was able to reach my group of friends- mostly people of my age and get their ideas and views on soaps.
Using Twitter enabled my to gain a larger group of responses through my group of 'followers' and through 'retweets'- reaching a larger, more varied audience. The responses I received supported this.

1. The majority of responses I received to the questionnaire were from people aged 19 and below, mainly in the 15-19 age category. This helps me as this is around the age we are looking at aiming our soap at. The further responses will help me gain and understanding into what they look for in a soap and their personal expectations.

2. 64% of the answers were from females. This shows that the responses to the questions are going to be mainly from a female point of view, with regards to interests and storylines. This will help me to gain information useful to my soap as most soap viewers are mainly female. This will also help me to gain an understanding into their expectations.

3. These responses show me what my potential audience are interested in. From these answers I may be able to take ideas for potential storylines that can be explored. They will also help me gain ideas as to the characters I would like to involve. People often watch soaps to find a character that they are familiar with or that they can gain a personal understanding with. So by using these responses I will be able to build personalities and traits of characters that I might be able to use within my soap. It will help to attract the target audience.

4. The responses to this question show that all of the audience watch soaps often. Over 50% watch them daily. This shows me that soaps are something that the target market are clearly interested in, so there is a market to produce soap operas for them.

5. This question helps me to understand why people feel the need to watch soaps and therefore what would help my soap keep in with these conventions to draw the audience in. Responses such as 'drama', 'enjoyable', 'want to see what happened next' and 'good characters' are particularly helpful in ideas for my soap. I will need to think about all these elements when coming up with the base concept for my soap, for which the trailer will advertise.

6. This question helped me to find storylines and characters that will be involved in my soap. The large audience response for EastEnders showed that a lot of people were interested in it. EastEnders deals with many issues and has a wide range of characters involved, a reason why it has such a large audience. There was also a considerably large response for Hollyoaks. This showed me that the soap we produce would be suitable as Hollyoaks is aimed at mainly young people, with an uptempo feel about it, it is clearly successful.

7. This is one of the most important questions I needed responses to. From this I have discovered the main areas that the soap and therefore the trailer will be focusing on. There was a large response for storyline as the most appealing factor of a soap. I will need to ensure that the soap trailer puts across an appealing storyline to the audience. It needs to be clear and something that they understand easily in a trailer format. The trailer will need to have relatable characters, this enforces the ideas that viewers watch soaps to find a common connection with the characters involved. I will need to build a set of characters that will be relatable to my audience, through personality and traits. The questionnaire also showed that the audience like humour in soaps.

 

8 and 9. The above responses showed previous soap storylines that were highlighted to be appealing. Many of these involved intense drama, action and emotion. These are all elements that soap address and that my soap will need to involve. I may look into the soap storylines more closely to discover the conventions they involved that I could consider adding in my trailer to make it appealing to the audience in the same way.

10. The last question suggested possible gaps in the market that we could explore when producing the concept for our soap. Many of these results showed that the soap market was in need of a soap aimed solely at younger people. 'Teenagers, my life, school etc, like Waterloo Road', 'School/college', 'University life', 'people my age', 'set in a school' were mainly highlighting the fact there is no soap currently aimed at young people or set in a school like environment. This helps me because I now know an area that could be explored that would produce a successful soap.