Survey Preparation And Emailing Female Cinematographers!
As our module of Professional Studies requires us to get out and gather primary research for our report (on which I have blogged previously), over the course of the weekend, I not only finalised my survey and put it online, I also contacted about 130 women cinematographers via email, asking them for their permission and possible participation in my online survey.
But let me start at the beginning:
Conceiving the Survey: Becoming a Cinematographer: Pathways and Challenges for Women in the Industry
In order to be able to get my survey done and out of the way with, I decided that I would finally settle on the ten questions that I was allowed by the online survey provider SurveyMonkey.
Much like last year, and as I’ve blogged in my blog entry ‘On the Subject of My Report Subject…’, I wanted to conduct research by using SurveyMonkey. Due to the fact that you can put your survey online, which in turn can then either be accessed on a computer or even on a mobile phone for those who are busy, I feel that I will have a higher chance of getting more replies even with busier people, which I guessed would be the case with cinematographers anyway.
Furthermore, if you are able to restrict yourself to only ten questions, you don’t need to pay for a premium account, but can conduct your survey as efficiently as possible regardless. Which I was dead-set to do. Thus, compared to my last blog entry in which I still had 11 questions to contemplate on, I was now reduced to these ten questions in just that order:
Survey Questions
What was your professional path into cinematography?
How long did it take you until your first job as a cinematographer?
And how long have you been working as a cinematographer?
What do you think are the biggest obstacles for women wanting to become cinematographers?
How do your male colleagues treat you?
Did you feel that male colleagues had been treated differently than you? If so, how?
What skill(s), strategies, or coping mechanisms would you recommend for women wanting to work in cinematography?
If this applies to you, how did you cope with unjust behaviour towards your person?
If this applies to you, did entering a collective help you further your career?
Voluntary information: What is your name? (Only for internal purposes and treated with utmost confidentiality.)
I tried to phrase these questions as broadly as possible without becoming too vague, as I wanted my contributors to be able to enter anything that they would relate to the issues in question while still expanding on their opinion and experiences as much as possible. I did not want to restrict them too much in the way I phrased my questions. For this, in the accompanying email, I also offered them to come back to me in case they had any questions or I had not made myself clear enough.
Having put my questions into words, I then moved onto SurveyMonkey’s website and entered the questions using the Copy-and-paste function that was an update compared to last year’s survey. This not only spared me some time re-typing the questions, the software behind it also analysed the type of questions I asked and automatically offered the type of answer boxes that would usually go along with them.
And while the option of ‘Single Textbox’ seemed a really smart option to go with, it would sadly only allow for up to five lines of reply. Since I wanted to keep the questions as well as the answers as wide as possible, I then moved on to the survey generator and changed the single textbox option to the comment textbox option.
Once I did that, I then moved onto submitting the survey and received the survey link, which will redirect to my survey called ‘Becoming a Cinematographer: Pathways and Challenges for Women in the Industry’ under the link as follows:
https://www.surveymonkey.co.uk/r/NN895B8
Conducting Primary Research
As mentioned in the beginning of this blog entry, I bulk-emailed about 130 women cinematographers on Sunday, which took me roughly four hours emailing them back and forth in person and to answer to some replies.
While this amount of people addressed seem to indicate that I wanted to conduct quantitative research, I indeed aim to conduct qualitative research, asking for personal opinions, experiences, and solutions. My reasoning for emailing so many people was based on the natural assumption that I would get more replies the more people I asked. I felt that the ratio would improve regardless, so there was nothing to lose for me in doing so. The best that could happen anyway would be if many cinematographers answered. It’s the more the merrier after all!
My Primary Research Target Group
Regarding the fact that I mainly source from collectives for female cinematographers, I went online onto Cinematographers XX and Illuminatrix to get contact details. While Cinematographers XX only allowed contact to their cinematographers through them, I emailed my request for a survey, completely
Thus, I ended up devising two different emails, depending on whether I would contact them more collectively or personally. The templates for these emails thus looks like this:
The Collective’s Edition
Subject Line: ’Enquiry – Survey on Pathways and Challenges of Women Cinematographers
Hi,
My name is Svea and I am a German student studying Creative Film and Moving Image at The Northern School of Art in Hartlepool, UK.
Since my childhood, I was mesmerised by cinematography and it led to my career aspiration of becoming a cinematographer. Because of that – and as a part of my module assignment this year – I am writing a report on the various pathways and possibilites for women to enter cinematography despite the extremely low employment numbers globally.
As a part of this report, I would like to conduct a qualitative study with female cinematographers on their individual paths, perception, and struggles, but also their individual solutions to asserting themselves in the industry. My aim is to gather a comprehensive understanding of the situation for women working in cinematography and to offer strategies and guidelines for future generations.
The study contains ten questions in total and can be completed online via Surveymonkey. All feedback is anonymous and will be treated with the utmost confidentiality. The link to my survey can be found here:
https://www.surveymonkey.co.uk/r/NN895B8
I would be very happy if your collective would put my survey forward to your members. Their time and support would be much appreciated. If any questions should arise, feel free to contact me via eMail at: harsfa9891@northernart.ac.uk
Thank you in advance for your support and I remain,
Yours faithfully,
Svea Hartle’
For this, I luckily also received a message receipt, so I at least know that this has reached its goal. It will now be a question of whether the collective is forwarding my message to its members or not.
Finger’s crossed! However, I’m rather positive about it. Regarding the fact that I want to research and analyse why the situation is this bad for female cinematographers in general, I don’t see any reason why my report/survey should be denied by a collective that has been founded especially because of this situation; apart from reasons of data protection, of course.
The Individual’s Edition
Subject Line: ’Enquiry – Survey on Pathways and Challenges of Women Cinematographers’
Dear XXXX,
My name is Svea and I am a German student studying Creative Film and Moving Image at The Northern School of Art in Hartlepool, UK. I received your email address via Illuminatrixdops.com.
Since my childhood, I was mesmerised by cinematography and it led to my career aspiration of becoming a cinematographer. Because of that – and as a part of my module assignment this year – I am writing a report on the various pathways and possibilities for women to enter cinematography despite the extremely low employment numbers globally.
As a part of this report, I would like to conduct a qualitative study with female cinematographers on their individual paths, perception, and struggles, but also their individual solutions to asserting themselves in the industry. My aim is to gather a comprehensive understanding of the situation for women working in cinematography and to offer strategies and guidelines for future generations.
The study contains ten questions in total and can be completed online via Surveymonkey. All feedback is anonymous and will be treated with the utmost confidentiality.
I was wondering whether you would be interested in participating in my survey. Your time and support would definitely be very much appreciated! If you should encounter any questions, feel free to contact me via email at: harsfa9891@northernart.ac.uk
Thank you in advance! I am looking forward to a positive answer and remain,
Yours sincerely,
Svea Hartle’
My Results so Far
Sadly, despite the tremendous amount of emails I sent out yesterday, this morning, I only had two filled out surveys to show for. While I am aware that this is an extremely short amount of time answering a survey, and that weekends are considered far more precious in the UK and are really used as recreation, compared to Germany, I still thought that I might stand a higher chance of getting more responses, if I caught people on their day off instead of during the work week when they are most likely either in their office or on set filming.
Well, it’s been only one day, so I will see how time improves upon these results. There’s still a couple of weekends left for all those cinematographers who want to participate but did not yet find the time to do so. Plus, I still have the option of going through the International Collective of Female Cinematographers and email them. Since their website was down when I checked their contact form online, I will have to retry later.
And if all else fails, I still have at least two answers to analyse in depth for my report.
All is well.
References:
Cinematographers XX (2019) CXX [online] https://www.cinematographersxx.com [Accessed on 3 March 2019]
Illuminatrix (2019) Illuminatrix Homepage [online] http://www.illuminatrixdops.com/About-illuminatrix [Accessed on 3 March 2019]
International Collective of Female Cinematographers (2019) About International Collective of Female Cinematographers [online] https://icfcfilm.com/about.html [Accessed on 3 March 2019]
International Collective of Female Cinematographers (2019) International Collective of Female Cinematographers Homepage [online] http://icfcfilm.com [Accessed on 3 March 2019]
SurveyMonkey (2019) Survey: Becoming a Cinematographer: Pathways and Challenges for Women in the Industry [online] https://www.surveymonkey.co.uk/r/NN895B8 [Accessed on 3 March 2019]