Reflection Of Our Focus Group

We have carried out a focus group with one group which is our own media class of year 13's. The session was very helpful however, as we asked a range of questions which aided our initial ideas of how we were going create a music video for the genre of R&B. I had created a consent form so that the class were happy to take part and Eboni created a power point of visual aids which included pictures of R&B artists and extracts of music videos from these artists. This formed the base of our questions and helped narrow down our talk which would give focused and detailed answers.

Firstly, we informed the group about the background of R&B with some information about general conventions and how it had changed over time. We asked what the audience already knew about R&B and who their favourite artists were in general to see if anyone's favourite artist was in fact, an R&B artist. This was not the case however, once we discussed certain artists from this genre, it appeared that they were still very popular with our group. By asking these sorts of questions we were able to question why they liked certain artists and what about them made the stand out from other artists.

There were some older R&B videos mixed with some newer ones and so we could show this comparison to our audience. When asked which type of R&B was better, the audience response was generally that an older type video was preferred as they gave more of a sense of reality. They didn't like the newer videos as they focussed more of wealth and success which came across arrogant as well as the desirable, sexual representation of women which was not approved by many. With the male audience of the focus group approving of the women being represented as sexual, they still found that whilst it is ok for a woman to represented as sexual, they found that the way the women were represented in Miss independent (classy and dominant) was more attractive that limited clothing.

A question that was put forward questioned whether narrative videos were more popular or performance based videos. We showed them extracts of Drake's 'Started from the bottom' which is very much followed with narrative and compared it with Usher's 'Yeah' which is predominantly a performance by Usher himself. The audience were again mixed. Some people enjoyed the story telling element of the music video as it was something to follow however, the more popular choice was the performance based video of Usher as it focuses more on the song itself rather than a story which allows the artist to dance to his own music and let the music do the work.