Abstract
A person’s immediate mood may affect their opinion of a movie soon after watching it. A person can be in various moods. This translates into a myriad of opinions of a movie if many people are considered.
In this proposed study, 200 employees of a particular organization will take place in a study in which the researcher will try to determine a person’s mood prior to watching a movie and the opinion they form about the movie later.
It is expected that persons with negative moods will have a negative opinion of the movie and persons with positively skewed moods will have positive opinions.
Statistically significant results of this study will lead to better post premiership reviews of movies, may be a step closer towards better future reviews, and will foster further research in this field.
Participants
This study will target at least 200 employees of a large organization. The participants will be picked through an email that will be sent to all employees in the company. The email will establish availability of a certain individual, gender, and ethnicity to ensure all demographics are captured in the study.
The email will also state that the participants will go for a premier movie, whose ticket will be provided, as long as they participate in this study slightly before and after the movie. The study will take approximately 30 minutes in the two sessions.
The employees who participate will also get a bonus ticket for yet another movie at the end of the movie under study. This will be a token of appreciation for participating in the study and will ensure that the participants take part in the study until the end.
Design
The study will correlate a person’s mood prior to watching a movie and the opinion they form of the movie after watching. The predictor variable is a person’s mood before the movie and the criterion variable is the opinion they form after watching it.
The mood of participants will be measured by listing a number of moods ranging from sad and unpleasant to cheerful and excited. The moods will be categorized broadly into pleasant and unpleasant.
The participants will rank themselves in either category by choosing the most appropriate mood to describe them at that point (Zeally and Aitken, 2012).
Opinions will be measured by a 5 point Likert Scale ranging from ‘1’ to indicate the participant did not like the movie at all to ‘5’ indicating a high regard for the movie (Unuth, 2012).
Correlation analysis tools such as Excel and SPSS will be used for analysis to come up with meaningful information. However, careful data cleaning will be required to ensure that all questionnaires are filled well.
Procedure
The management of the organization, whose employees this study will sample, will watch out for an upcoming movie with estimated mass viewership.
The management will then send an email informing employees of the upcoming study to establish if there is a relationship between a person’s mood prior to watching a movie and the opinion they form of the movie afterwards.
The email will categorically state the number of participants (200 employees) and the amount of time the study may take.
Additionally, the company will pay for the tickets for the movie. It will encourage women and people from different ethnicities to participate. The researcher will have to be careful at this stage because of the high stakes at logistics.
On the selected day of the movie, participants will arrive about 45 minutes before the movie starts.
This will give them ample time to fill the first questionnaire (which will require them to select the most appropriate mood they think they are in) and allow for other logistical deadlines such as settling in their seats and handing out tickets.
The researcher will have organized for a room where participants will fill the questionnaires. Everyone will have to be there before anyone fills his or her questionnaire. The researcher will state explicitly that the study is voluntary and no one is compelled to fill all questions.
However, it would be important to fill both parts of the study to make it relevant to the researcher. After filling the first questionnaire, the researcher will allocate numbers to respondents and ask them to write it on the questionnaire. They will write the same number on the second questionnaire upon filling it.
The researcher will hand the second questionnaire to the participants after they leave the movie hall. This will have to be done at the exit of the hall because some participants may leave in a hurry and forget the second part.
The second questionnaire will determine the opinion that the participant has formed of the movie. The opinions will be measured in a 5 point Likert Scale with ‘1’ indicating an extremely negative opinion and ‘5’ indicating a highly positive opinion of the movie.
The questionnaire will not require to be filled at a particular place since it will have very few questions. Hence, it will take less than 5 minutes for a participant to fill.
After the movie, the researcher will hand another bonus ticket as a token of appreciation for participating in the study. This movie ticket will also act an incentive to participate in the study to the last minute.
Measures
Positive and Negative Affect Schedule (PANAS)
This schedule consist of 60 moods that a person can have at a particular time (Zeally and Aitken, 2012). The moods are offered in a Likert scale format. ‘1’ indicates ‘not at all in the mood’ and ‘5’ represents ‘extremely in the mood’.
The moods range from pleasant ones such as ‘cheerful’, moderate ones such as ‘anxious’ to unpleasant ones such as ‘disgusted’. The participants will answer as truthfully as possible (Zeally and Aitken, 2012).
Circumplex Model of Affect
To categorize the moods into pleasant and unpleasant meaningfully, the researcher will use Circumplex Model of Affect.
The Mean Opinion Score (MOS)
The Mean Opinion Score (MOS) by Unuth (2012) will be used to measure opinions of participants regarding the movie.
It categorizes opinion from 1 to 5. This includes ‘impossible to communicate’, ‘very annoying’, ‘annoying’, ‘fair with some imperfections’ and ‘perfect’ respectively. The above categorization will form a basis for easy analysis by use of software (Unuth, 2012).
Discussion
A person’s mood before watching a movie is expected to affect a person’s opinion of the movie after watching. A good mood is likely to result in a favorable opinion while a foul mood is likely to result in a negative opinion of the movie.
The study supports this hypothesis as it results in a correlation coefficient of 0.72. This indicates a statistically positive relationship between the two variables. Hence, it shows that a person’s mood has a large impact on the opinion they form about a movie.
If the hypothesis had not been statistically supported, then we would conclude that a person’s mood has no any relationship with the opinion they form about a movie. Hence, it is paramount not to make decisions such as movie reviews based upon the opinions of individuals. This is because such a review may be skewed one way or the other depending upon who participates in it.
The three most likely causal relationships that could have altered a variable in this study includes a busy day at home at work or in traffic, the happening of an event during the day or expectation of such an event in future (e.g. wedding, burial), and nature of the prevailing weather.
The movie that is shown will be highly advertised. It is expected that an employee who regularly goes to the movies will have heard about it. However, there is a possibility that this particular movie is not a person’s ‘type of movie’.
In this case, favorable opinion is less likely despite the person been in a good mood. Additionally, an unfavorable opinion is highly likely if a person is in a foul mood.
However, this may change in the course of the movie and result in a favorable opinion. These limitations may skew the outcome of the study. They are likely to happen.
In carrying out similar researches in future, researchers can focus on giving respondents their ‘type of movie’ to overcome this limitation.
Additionally, this study can be done spontaneously to find the respondents in their most natural state of mind. This is likely to result in a more representative study. Inversely, it may not be logistically possible to carry out.
References
Unuth, N. (2012). Mean Opinion Score (MOS). Web.
Zeally, A.K. & Aitken, R.C. (2012). Measuring of Mood. Web.