Audiences for Specialised Film in English Regions
This website allows data from ‘Beyond the Multiplex: audiences for specialised film in English regions’ (see Project Background) to be searched, explored, and visualised. It provides various ways to examine how film audiences form around specialised and mainstream film, how people’s personal film journeys are shaped, and geographies of film exhibition provision within each of the four English regions. It also demonstrates how mixed methods research can be used to develop meaningful theory from an empirical base in film and audience studies (see Outputs).
Using this site
This website provides datasets, search tools, and data visualisations for researchers, people working in film exhibition and film audience development, as well as students and teachers. For detailed guidance see the webpage on ‘How to use the search and data visualisation tools’ and the ‘Tutorial videos’.
The search tool provides a way to examine and explore the research data, the ontology provides detail on specific concepts within the data, while the various data visualisations provide useful insights into various aspects of how film features within people’s lives, and the processes through which film audiences form.
For students embarking on research projects, teachers, supervisors, and/or mentors, separate research datasets provide a useful set of resources for working through mixed data on a topic of interest, and can each be used in secondary research.
The datasets
The separate datasets underpinning the ontology, search, and data visualisation (set out below) tools can each be downloaded from the University of Glasgow Enlighten data repository. They may be used in secondary research without restriction under a creative commons attribution 4.0 (CC-BY-4.0) license:
- 200 in-depth interviews with film audience members in each region that explore people’s personal film journeys and how film features within people’s lives, including their relationship with films and film taste, venues, digital platforms, and the meanings they take away from watching different types of film.
- Responses to a three-wave survey (N=5071 / n=547 / n=317) which capture patterns of film watching across the four English regions over time, including demographics, film taste, film watching frequency, collective film watching and film watching venues and media.
- 16 film-elicitation groups examine the narratives and thematic components of specialised films to better understand the interpretative resources audiences bring to watching film.
- An analysis of 114 key film policy and industry documents identifies policy and industry trends around specialised films.
- 27 semi-structured interviews with film industry and policy experts examine challenges and concerns of people working within the the policy and industry landscape of specialised film exhibition, distribution and investment.