Aims and Considerations Sheet

                                                                              Aims and Considerations sheet

Existing Products:

How many existing artefacts do you feel you will need to look at?  I am unsure exactly how many different artefacts I will need to look at when researching to create my own social action campaign. I will need to look at enough to have a variety of research, which would suggest I would need to look at several existing artefacts, perhaps roughly four or five.

What kinds of artefacts are you expecting to look at? The artefacts I look at will depend on the kind of social action campaign I intend to go through with, of which I am currently unsure. I may intend to do a social action campaign about raising awareness for mental health, or potentially a campaign about LGBT+ equality. With these potential campaigns in mind, it would be most conductive to my research to look at artefacts pertaining to these two kinds of social action campaign, as I am most likely to do a campaign about one or the other for my project.

What elements will you look at to help you with your research? A few elements that I will need to look at to help improve my research would include trying to learn more statistics and facts regarding my chosen social action campaign, as this will help me to create more factual and meaningful campaigns. I will also want to look at how other, similar campaigns were designed and what images they used, both to inspire me in my own creation of a social action campaign, and also so that I will be able to create something that is unique to the currently existing artefacts.

Primary Research:

How many people would you hope to question as part of your primary research? I imagine I would need to question at least a handful of people, in order to get varied results from a large enough sample size. However, while a large number of people questioned for research would be ideal for gathering the necessary amount of information, it may not necessarily be feasible depending on what methods I use in order to question people.

What methods will you use? While perhaps talking face to face and interviewing people would be one of the best ways to get detailed, qualitative information and research, it may not be the most practical way as it can be quite lengthy and time consuming, and I would only be able to reach a certain amount of people. A potentially easier way to reach a wider group of people to gather information and data from them would be through the internet, potentially making some kind of survey and put it on social media. This way it could potentially reach a larger group of people in a shorter amount of time, but the information that could be gathered maybe slightly more limited, as it would be confined to pre-set questions. However, this simply means that I would need to make sure that the questions I set for the survey in the first place would help me to gather all the information that I needed.

Could there be issues in getting access to people affected by your chosen social issue? Depending on the social issue I choose, either one could potentially make it difficult to gain access to people who had been personally affected by the issue. For example, many people who were of an LGBT+ sexual orientation, or people who had or had in someway been affected by mental health problems may be reluctant to talk about them. It will be important to ask questions only to people who are comfortable discussing these topics, and to ask them in a respectful way. However, I will not necessarily only want access to people who had personally been affected by these social issues, but also potentially by people who hadn't been affected by them, especially if I am trying to raise awareness, and will want to know what it is that other people generally do not know about the subject at hand.

How will you know if your research has been successful? I will know my research has been successful if I can refer to it throughout the project in order to help guide me in creating my social action campaign. The research I gather should be able to be my point of reference throughout the project to help me decide how to design the campaign, what content to put in it, what information to present and how to present it. My research should be able to tell me what is most important to include in the campaign and how it can be beneficial to the cause I am campaiging for.

Considerations:

Why might you need to be sensitive when carrying out research on social action issues? It is important to be sensitive when researching about these social issues because many people will have been personally affected by them, and therefore it is necessary to treat these issues respectfully and with sensitivity to the feelings of the people that volunteered to help you with research.

Could you face any problems when trying to research social action issues? If so, is there a way to overcome these? There are many potential problems that could come when trying to research these social action issues. For example, not being able to find enough people from which to gather research and information from. This could especially be a potential problem if I attempt to gather information from people by interviewing them face to face. I could overcome this potentially problem by broadening my research to include the asking people through the internet. Another potential problem I may encounter is that the research that I gather may conflict with my initial plans for my social action campaign, and that the plans I have will not reflect what has been said by the people who were interviewed and questioned, and therefore the plans would have to change to suit this new data and information. While I could tailor my questionaires and interviews and other tools of research in order to ensure the research reflects what I want to do, it would be better to go along with the information gathered from my research and tailor my social action campaign around the information I find out, as this would ultimately make it a better campaign, more suited to the audience it is supposed to reach.

Where would you expect your finished pieces to be displayed and distributed? I currently plan that my campaign will take the form of a poster or a series of posters, and therefore it will most likely be put on walls or displayed in a similar fashion. Where specifically it is distributed may be affected by potential research into geodemographics, as this may help me to determine which groups of people in what places would most benefit from the campaign, or who it would be most practical to reach out to with it. However, just because it is most likely to be a poster does not necessarily mean I cannot share it in other formats, such as digitially through the internet and social media, which is a good way to help it reach a broader audience, and potentially infiltrate mainstream media in a way that would be most likely much more difficult if I was simply physically putting it up in places near me.

What funding issues might a social action organisation face? A notable problem for a social action organisation is that it is, generally, built on a non-profit model. It relies upon support and donations from others in order to continue. This means it may be quite difficult to initially gain funding. Many campaigns will tend to appeal for donations as a part of their campaign in order to continue to produce new campaigns. While most of the money will generally go towards helping their chosen cause, a certain portion will be needed to continue to produce campaigns.

What ethical considerations might you need to think about? There are many ethical concerns to consider throughout this project, both in the research, production and display. Especially because the core of the project is social action, many of the subjects can be a source of sensitivity for a large amount of people, and it is important to be respectful of this. It is also important to not be exploitative when it comes to creating campaigns, and not use real people and elements of their lives for shock value in campaigns.

How could social, personal and political issues affect your research? It is possible that I would be more inclined to research into campaigns that are more in line with my own personal beliefs, rather than ones that I do not personally agree with. I am also more likely to actually create a campaign that is more based around what I feel and believe in rather than something I do not.

How could the community characteristics and their resources affect your research? It may be difficult to find information during some of the research. For example, if I do choose to go down the route of doing a social action campaign about mental health awareness, one issue I had initially found is that there is some information lacking. For example, there has apparently been very little widespread research done on the statistics of people who have had mental health issues, and much of it has been disputed and considered unreliable, which may mean that not all the information that I may find can be trusted and used in my work.