Audience Research; Focus Group

I put together a focus group consisting of ten people, not including myself, of various ages, sexes, social class and ethnicities. One of the people at the focus group was in prison himself for a number of years, therefore he had an idea of what is and is not realistically shown in prison related films or television programs. I collected key scenes from prison related media:
The Shawshank Redemption, Scum, Bad Girls & Porridge.

I chose to do this rather than show the focus group one film/show so that they could compare what I had shown them and could contrast what they had seen in each clip. I asked the focus group to write down anything they found interesting or unusual whilst I also used a dictaphone to record their first reactions to the clips, some of which were quite graphic and they had never seen before. They also voiced their opinions on whether they believed certain films/programs were more accurate than others, even though most of them had not even stepped foot inside a prison. I felt it was important to gather their personal opinions regardless of this fact as they represented the viewing public for my research and I wanted different perspectives, especially as the majority of people will not have any experience of prison life either.

The person that had been in prison, Adam, said he knew people that had been physically & sexually assaulted by the Wardens, although he was not one of them. As I asked him questions, comparing & contrasting each of the programs/films he said, "there's a constant power struggle inside, and you have to come out on top or you're not gonna make it. The Shawshank Redemption's a nice film, but I wouldn't say it's realistic, but only because of the ending. It's nice to think that some people in prison can have so much hope, because when I was in, I didn't. One of my cellmates committed suicide the first week he was here, and I can't say I don't blame him. Porridge isn't supposed to be realistic I suppose because it's a comedy, but the cells looked realistic enough of the times, and the fact there's one stern warden & one 'soft' warden is true to the prison I was in myself. Bad Girls is a mix of the two, quite realistic I expect of women's prisons with a bit of comedy thrown in, although I think alot of it must have been exaggerated for dramatic effect, to make it more controversial."

One of the girls in my target audience said this about Bad Girls,"It shocked me so much when it came out that I promised myself I'd never commit a crime. The miscarriages in prison, the sexual and physical abuse, the suicide, all of that affected me quite a bit when I was younger. I honestly thought this happened day-in day-out in jail, and alot of it probably does, but I wonder now whether Adam hasn't got a valid point. Prison life may well be exaggerated in films & television shows to appeal to a wider audience, to shock them. Maybe even to shock them away from committing crimes?"

I asked her whether she had ever been inside a prison or seen a real prison cell and she said, "No, I've never seen the inside of a prison but in all the media I've seen of prison cells, they look really depressing and so small that I'd feel suffocated being there. There's no privacy." Everyone in the group agreed with this last remark, myself included.

I asked the group whether they felt that violence between inmates happened as much as it does in Scum, and one of them pointed out that many real-life criminals have been killed in prison by other inmates, such as serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer.

The focus group were all over 18 as nearly all prison related moving image shows brutal, shocking scenes and they are usually rated 18. Through researching I have found that men generally watch prison related moving image more than women. I asked the females in the group why they would not watch films such as Scum on a regular basis and one of them said that she is too "squeamish and emotional" to watch "scenes of rape and such realistic abuse all the time."

In Bad Girls, some women who were heterosexual before they went into prison form lesbian relationships whilst inside prison. Nearly all of the women in the focus group said they could understand why this happened, but only one of the men said this. One of the women who said she could relate to the relationships said, "If you're in prison for a long time, you'd miss intimacy and probably be sexually frustrated, so I can totally see why women would turn to other women in prison. However, I doubt this would happen nearly as much in an all-male environment. I forgot about this point actually until you brought it up; it's not one of the typical prisom 'stereotypes' that come to mind when I think of being in a prison."