Data-Gathering Methods

We had gathered out information by using in person interviews to see the opinions on the media’s portrayal of mental illness and its effect on its perception by the general population. Our method of collecting data is by having interviews. Our goal by using this method is to collect the most in depth answers we can get.
Rather than using surveys, we chose interviews to have more lengthy responses which we can analyze more easily. Our questions are ones that ask for a lengthy response. They are not simple yes or no but ones that make the participant really think and reflect about their response before speaking.

Interview Questions:

Demographics- We asked about people’s background to better categorize the data we were gathering.  We asked the age, gender, ethnicity, student of WWU or employee

Media Experience- These questions were to see what people’ s experiences were like with films and tv shows. We wanted to interview people who did see films like Still Alice, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Split 

  1. What genre of movies do you watch most often?
  2. How many hours on average per week do you spend watching movies? TV Shows?
  3. What kind of media do you consume? (News, TV, Movies)?
  4. On a scale from 1-5, how much influence does film have in your everyday actions?
  5. Have you watched any shows that pertain to, or have characters with mental illnesses?

Mental Health Awareness-

  1. Did you ever take a course relating to mental illness? Ex. Psychology, sociology, etc?
  2. Do you believe that our current media outputs (movies and tv) accurately portray mental illnesses? (Split/13 Reasons Why).
  3. Have you or someone you’ve known experienced psychological trauma from a film? Ex. explicit scene or no trigger warnings given.
  4. How much knowledge have you gained about mental health has come directly from media? Where does your knowledge mostly come from?

After this we decided to gather more general data by using surveys and seeing what a bigger set of people thought about these questions. They were mostly fill in the blank questions but for certain ones that involved movies we just had the option of “inaccurate” and “accurate.” This helped us analyze better than just a couple of interviews.