Analysis of Questionnaire

By Mohamed Bushra

▪ For our primary research, we designed and distributed questionnaires to our friends and other students. We gave our questionnaire out to a random selection of male and female students within our school. These students ranged from ages 16-18 and were a mixture of ethnicities.

▪ We chose to hand out our questionnaires to the whole Sixth Form because it is good to have a large quantity of data to analyse; also it was a large enough sample to gather a representative view of horror films.

The Questionnaire

▪ Q1) Which of these locations is likely to be seen in a horror film?

▪ - City

▪ - Village

▪ - Forrest

▪ - Beach

▪ - Desert

▪ - Other

▪ Q2) Why do you enjoy watching horror films?

▪ - Adrenaline

▪ - Torture

▪ - Tension

▪ - Gore

▪ - Death

▪ - Scariness

▪ - Other

▪ Q3) What would a main character/s likely be in a horror film?

▪ - Paranoid

▪ - Smart

▪ - Evil

▪ - Psycho

▪ - Devious

▪ - Sensible

▪ - Other

▪ Q4) Which soundtrack would likely be in a horror film?

▪ - Upbeat rock

▪ - Pop

▪ - Heavy metal

▪ - Rap/Hip Hop

▪ - Classical

▪ - Jazz

▪ - Other

▪ Q5) Which of these fonts is most suitable for a horror film?

▪ 1)

▪ 2)

▪ 3)

▪ 4)

▪ 5)

▪ 6)

▪ -

▪ -

▪ -

▪ Q6) Which age group do you think these films are aimed at?

▪ - 5-10 Years

▪ - 12-18 Years

▪ - 20-29 Years

▪ - 30-40 Years

▪ - 40-50 Years

▪ Q7) Which of these costumes is likely to be seen in a horror film?

▪ 1) 4)

▪ 2)

▪ 3)

Results of Questionnaire

The Analysis

▪ The first question clearly showed that they expect a horror film to be set in a forest, I think they choose this answer as their expectation of horror is to be somewhere far from society and urban areas. However, not far behind was ‘village’ as answer, which we more liked as it is closer to society and people.

▪ Additionally, modern horror films are all about playing with your feelings and locations where you think you’re safe e.g. house and in particular bedroom.

▪ For the second question the majority choose the reason for watching horror films is because they provide tense atmosphere but also adrenaline due to the events happening in the film. This question made it clear to me what media techniques to use in order to achieve what the audience expects to be present in a horror film trailer and therefore successfully target them. Linked to this the third question which asked about the behaviour of the main character and the majority choose him to be paranoid. These two questions link together as the atmosphere created in the scene fits with the attitude and behaviour of the character.

▪ The fourth questioned about the soundtrack of a horror film was asked to the audience because it plays a great role in a trailer. The majority choose classical music, this is because classical music will use some type of orchestral instruments which will have a larger impact on the audience than R&B or Pop as these two don’t scare the audience.

▪ Moving to another important part of horror film trailer and general trailer is the choice of fonts for the titles, our audience choose a font that has sharp ends and unusual shape for the letters. This connotes the genre and the atmosphere of the film.

▪ The last two question were about the age bracket of the audience for horror films & the character costumes associated with horror films. The audience choose 20-29 years old to be the popular age bracket for horror and the character costume similar to Freddy Krueger from Nightmare at Elm Street. These two results were what we expected from our audience as the age is due to the violence and goriness. However the costume has changed in modern horror films as the characters don’t need to be dressed up scary.

Audience Research Conditions

▪ Conducting a questionnaire can give you both valid & invalid data, if you look at how you constructed the questionnaire. For example for invalid data:

Specific selected people, we selected the people that are the same age as us, live in the same environment, some were our friends etc. This means that we didn’t distribute our questionnaire to everyone and therefore our results would count as invalid.

Answers that makes us happy, this point links with the previous one as we selected specific people to take questionnaire. This means that they will try to give the answers that we want & as some of them are our friends that chance significant.

Restricted information, this happened because of the answers that were available to choose from and most of the questions told the audience to ‘tick one answer only’. Meaning they could only choose from the answers that we provided.

▪ However we still think that most of our results collected are valid although we haven’t overcome all of our invalid points. This is because we offered the audience to put their answer in the ‘Other’ section of the questions.