About the Data

Semi-structured interviews with audience members

This dataset contains the anonymised transcripts of 200 interviews with audience members.

The interviews were conducted by Peter Merrington, Bridgette Wessels, Rosie Shute, Sarah Hargreaves, Helen Rana, Matthew Hanchard, and Liz Robson between November 2017 and April 2018. This included 50 interviews per studied English region. The interview questions garnered details about participants’ introduction to film (which informs the Personal Journeys Through Film data visualisation), their film preferences, and when, where, how, and with whom they watch films, as well as how their film-viewing habits have changed over time. In short, the interview questions focused on past practices and experiences, and the relations and interactions people had encountered within them through watching films.

The coding of the interview transcripts was conducted by Matthew Hanchard, Peter Merrington, and Bridgette Wessels between May 2018 and June 2019 using a form of applied thematic analysis. As the richest coding scheme, this dataset was used as a base template for coding all other qualitative datasets in the project.

Interviews with industry and policy experts

This dataset contains the anonymised transcripts of 27 interviews with film policy and industry experts.

The interviews were conducted by Roderik Smits and the interviewees were film exhibitors, distributers and policymakers at both regional and national levels. The questions focussed on the UK film industry over time and its current state.

Film elicitation focus groups

This dataset contains anonymised transcripts of sixteen film-elicitation focus groups conducted between September 2018 and November 2018 – four in each studied English region. 

In each film elicitation group, participants were shown a selection of four film clips (each lasting between six and eleven minutes) – two foreign language and two British specialised film titles that had been shown in UK independent cinemas in the previous year. A total of eight film titles were used across the focus groups, and the participants in each group watched and discussed extracts from four of these: 

The questions asked in each focus group covered the meanings people read or saw in the film clips, and how they made sense of the content of each film. 

The focus groups were conducted by David Forrest, Peter Merrington, Helen Rana, and Matthew Hanchard.

Three-wave sample survey about film consumption

This dataset contains a large sample survey undertaken in three waves spaced three months apart. The first wave was conducted in August 2018 by the Audience Agency, using a panel quota sample provided by ResearchNow. The first wave survey gathered 5,071 responses split evenly across the four English regions. The first wave survey questions covered film taste and preferences, when, where and with whom films had been watched over the last year, to identify consumption patterns, providing detail on broader cultural activity participation.  

The second wave survey, conducted in November 2018, followed a subset sample of respondents from the first wave who had expressed a preference for – or had watched – a specialised film in the last year. The survey waves two and three questions asked respondents to name up to five films they had recently watched and then asked questions related to those films, such as which film genre they felt they belonged to and what their experience of watching them had been like. Overall, survey wave two gathered 547 responses.

The third wave, conducted in January 2019, followed the same subset sample of respondents from the second survey wave, although this only gained 317 responses. The survey wave three questions mirrored those asked in survey wave two, in order to provide a comparison over time.

All survey questions were designed by Simeon Yates, Michael Pidd, Bridgette Wessels, Peter Merrington, and Matthew Hanchard.  

Policy and industry document analysis 

This dataset contains over 100 policy and industry documents in PDF, DOCX and XLS formats, including a coded version for analysis using NVivo. The dataset was compiled by Andrew Higson, Nathan Townsend, and Roderik Smits.

Socio-cultural index (secondary analysis)

The project involved a combined analysis of two secondary datasets in May 2018. These were the Department of Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS), ‘Taking Part’ (2017) and British Film Institute (BFI), ‘Opening Our Eyes’ (2011) surveys. The datasets include the R script for a hierarchical cluster analysis and a latent class analysis of both datasets combined conducted by Simeon Yates.

The DCMS ‘Taking Part’ survey was one year of a longitudinal face-to-face household survey of adults who are aged 16 and over, and children aged 5 to 15 years old in England that has run since 2005. The adult dataset has been used in the Beyond the Multiplex analysis. The DCMS survey’s main objective was to provide a central, reliable evidence source of data that can be used to analyse cultural, sports and digital engagement, providing a clear picture of why people do or do not engage in various cultural activities. The survey collects data on engagement in the arts, museums and galleries, archives, libraries, heritage and sport. It includes information on frequency of participation, reasons for participating, barriers to participation and attitudes to cultural sectors, and it gathers information on demographics (e.g. age, education, income and socio-economic status). ‘Taking Part’ is designed to yield a representative sample of 10,000 adults aged 16+ who are normally resident in England. The data collected in the 2016-2017 sample (N=10,171) is a mixed sample, evenly divided between fresh sample cases and re-interview cases.  Beyond the Multiplex used the ‘Taking Part’ survey data to model the latent classes of general arts and cultural attendance.

The BFI’s ‘Opening Our Eyes’ study (Northern Alliance and Ipsos MediaCT, 2011) had a mixed methods research design composed of qualitative paired interviews, a survey, and case studies. Some of the data is publicly available, whilst sensitive data has been retained by the BFI. Beyond the Multiplex draws solely on the publicly-available survey data which comprises 2,036 online self-completion questionnaires. The BFI survey sample is representative of 46 million UK individuals aged 15 to 74, and the online sample is comparable with offline UK samples both of the same age group and in terms of working status, income, marital status, children in household and the UK areas in which their respondents live.