Music Video Research Methods - Outcomes

The outcome of my research led me to find a variety of useful information, the majority of which from secondary resources, concerning theories on how an audience would find visual satisfaction from viewing something such as an R’n’B music video, due to the representation of women in this form of media as sexual objects and the hyper reality of the male artists lifestyle it would appeal to a primarily male audience. Through my research I found that there were many ways in which females could be exploited and represented in a negative manner in visual media such as music videos and my primary resources such as the focus group seemed to confirm this as the majority of people asked gave some valid points, they thought the women in the videos were being exploited and objectified by the male artists ad were deliberately sexualized for visual gratification for the audience. The secondary resources I used contained a large amount of information on theories like the male gaze, which I could apply to the music videos in order to draw a comparison between how the women are represented and the reasoning behind this sexualization, which helped me make points to argue how they were being objectified and used in these videos as opposed to being empowered as some of my research might have claimed. The outcome of the research using my secondary resources was that I had a large amount of information and direct quotes from the sources such as Mulveys Male gaze theory that I could then use to link to the texts in order to show how an R’n’B music would appeal to its target demographic. My research also helped me realize how media such as music videos are constructed to appeal to its audience in order to offer visual gratification through the objectification of the women, however I believe that this could lead to negative effects in reality as the male audience might see it as acceptable to treat women in the way they are portrayed in these videos and this point was brought up during the focus group. I think that If I needed to improve on my research I would try and focus on finding more reliable sources of secondary information and conduct more primary research such as questionnaires and more frequent focus groups, which would give me more leads to other sources, I would also go through the procedure of checking the validity of the information I gathered more efficiently in order to get more accurate data from my research. I think that through my research I managed to address some major points such as the objectification of the women in these videos and the gratification the audience might get from viewing them, so I believe that my research was valid and accurate in its application of theory to the texts and the focus groups reactions and questions seem to back this up as the majority of their opinions coincided with the research I had undertaken and this confirmed that my research did have validity as the majority agreed with the theories that were applied to the videos.