EOC week 6: Deeper meaning of the film BIG

The movie Big starring Tom Hanks, is an amusing story of how feeding a quarter to a magical arcade game can change a boy’s life and give him an opportunity to become the vice-president of a major toy company. Ignoring the plot and focusing on the marketing aspect of the film, I noticed how exploratory research was being employed. Exploratory research can illuminate the environment and help advance the aim of the research. The focus groups that were made up of kids that played with the toys and expressed their attitudes toward the products. These focus groups are in an interactive setting, coordinated by the company. This form of longitudinal research examines shifts over time. Casual research was being performed by the president of the company on the weekends. He would walk around the store and observe how the consumers reacted and interacted with the products. This approach relies upon the experiments to establish a cause and effect relationships by controlling external influences in an effort to evaluate the cause and effect relationship between the two variables. Also brainstorming was another way research was being carried out in the movie. Once Josh (Tom Hanks’ character) gave his ideas they rest of the group was able to feed off of his creativity. Had they conducted the research with more people, then they would have had more data to use that would have made a better product. Most of the research done cannot be used in a valid or reliable way, because the professional who was using his knowledge as a child and not as someone who knows what they are doing. I’ll hand it to the kid, he was able to make a success of himself and evade the police for the kidnapping of himself. Reliability in a research context is the degree to which measures are free from random error and, therefore, yield consistent results. The company could have double checked all of the components of the study to make sure there were no data errors, but they probably were wondering what happened to the big guy when he went missing.