Abstract:

With widespread and ever-growing use of on-line data collection methods among researchers, this form of data acquring, data distribution and results promotion have become quite common in today’s digital media oriented world of science. Contrary to traditional approaches (paper questionnaires, narrative or semi-directed interviews), they provide from its very nature much faster, more efficient and most flexible ways of intellectual inquiry. While concentrating on media reception/fan studies areas we can easily observe an increasingly significant use of qualitative and quantitative research procedures that arise and benefit from ongoing and more general battle of methodologies.

The research project presented here and conducted with the state financial support (Patterns of Moving Images: Film and Audiovisual Reception Among Contemporary Czech Young People supported through grant scheme of Czech Science Foundation no. GP406/08/P176) was participated by circa 2300 young people participants – teenagers and adolescents who agreed on completing an on-line survey. The principal attention of research has focused on participants’ everyday viewing habits and their conceptualization of film fiction hero favorite or a positive role model to follow. The study was administered during a single week of 2008 via CSFD.cz – the largest Czech web site devoted solely to cinema and a local equivalent of Internet Movie Database (IMDb) with traffic reaching up to 100 000 unique vistitors per day. During data acquistion process, researchers experienced not just mere disciplinary difficulties, minor methodological obstacles and communicatoin gaps but they also tended to learn many valuable lessons from participants’ feedback provided by a number of participant who also took their active role in following investigation process (personal or e-mail interviews, round-table informal talks, brainstorming sesssions) that was all aimed at deeper understanding how film and media in general influence their lives.

In a nutshell, this paper will focus on new questions, problems and innovations related to media education and adjacent viewer’s identification process. It will outline specific experience being made in personal contact with respondents as well as forms of participance and research appreciation (emotional and intellectual reactions, initial and subsequent expression of interest, risk-taking parts of the survey, the key conceptual problem of identification with film fiction heroes etc.). We will also juxtapose our research findings with past research efforts concerning similar issues. Thus, as a whole this paper should also enrich and revise some of the concepts and issues related to recent research in the field of media education (exploring the phenomena of experiential learning, fandom, media reception etc.).

Keywords:

media education research, case study, media methodology, questionnaire, media.