For the final assignment of this semester we had to look at the topic we chose in semester one and develop a proposal of how we would develop it further using techniques developed in the second semester.
The topic I chose was ‘Smoking‘ at the start it was a very open search from why people started smoking, to health related problems, legislation and advertising and how these all related back to design. I took it on further in the final assignments in semester one. I started to focus more on the advertising side of smoking and how it has an affect on people who do smoke. My main focus was on the question, ‘Does advertising have any affect on smokers/smoking?‘. The research that I have already completed was secondary research based, when looking into advertising in relation to the effects on smoking that information was full of statistics that other people had collected from doing there own from of primary research, articles and journals that people had wrote. I feel that the information I have already collected now needs more specific questions and data collected which would be best done using forms of primary research. Finding the information myself has come at a good time especially from doing the assignments in the last (second) semester, they focused on the use of techniques that would help collect primary evidence. From completing these assignments I now know which methods would work best for the information that is needed.
The first form of primary research I will carry out will be an interview of local people in the Dundee area, an interview would gain important information from those people who smoke. I would ask non smokers similar questions that the smokers were asked to find out what both sides feel about advertising and what effects they had on them. With an interview you can get the questions you need answered and also be given information that you may not have thought to be relevant. The only problem with an interview is that the interviewee could be making the answers up which would result in the answers being invalid. The best way to get round this problem would be to ask people who are comfortable with answering the questions, there is more chance of getting honest answers back from them. Before going straight into an interview I think it is best to mind map the topic first. I did this on an other assignment which was to carry out an interview and record your findings, the mind map helped high light questions that would be good to ask and brought up others that link them together. With some answers people give you they can lead onto a question you may not have thought of so it is best to have time and note taking space to allow this to happen. From this you can gain a lot of vital information.
The second research method I will use will be an observation, since from doing the pervious assignment with an observation I felt it gave you more of a realistic view of something. With an observation, it gives a first response to something, I would ask a couple of smokers and non smokers to come and watch a number of smoking advertising clips and images individually to see how they all reacted to them. This I feel would give you an insight to how effective advertising is at first glance, as well as getting to see how they react when no one else is round them. Although this does not give you any information on what the people will do after seeing the images but there are no easy ways of recording that sort of data. It would be an interesting experiment as I think that the reaction between the non smokers and smokers would be a lot different than one another.
The third form of primary research to be carried out would be a visual analysis, at the start I thought it wouldn’t provide much information, but thinking back to an older assignment I felt the same at the start of it but in the end I found out a lot from looking at a persons belongings that what I thought I would. The type of image I would look at would be of people smoking or of an advertising campaign, the only problem I have with this type of research is that the information gained is only what you yourself make of the image making the results very bias. What you get from an image and what someone else could make of it may be completely different. For this technique I would ask a number of people (smokers and non smokers) to analysis the images to see if people saw the same things. This could make the information gained more correct in comparison to one persons reaction. An easy way to record this information would be on a brain storm, write down each word or phrase people came up with when they looked the image, and see if there were many of a similar nature. This could then lead into a mind map showing all the information grained from this analysis divided up into sections. I found that when completing mind maps it helped lay out information so that it was easy to read and simple to follow.
The methods of primary research I have suggested through out this proposal are best for the information I want to find out. All the information will be gathered and analysed which will lead to different statistics etc, this will follow in a conclusion that answers the question, ‘Does advertising have an effect on smokers/smoking?’.
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