Radio- Vox Pop Evaluation

We created a Vox Pop in which we asked different people a question on Remembrance Day. As there were 5 people in my group each of us asked a different member of the public the same question and we recorded what each of them said.

The question we asked was ‘As you know it is Remembrance Day soon, do you think we should still be commemorating the deaths from the past wars or should we now be focusing on the deaths from the current war?’ Part of my role was to ask a member of the public if they would mind answering the question for us and if they didn’t, I then asked the above question and recorded their response.

This worked well however I feel that because our question was quite long some people we asked had to get us to repeat the question. If we had used a simpler straightforward question I think the people we asked would have understood it more easily. I also think that our question was quite limiting as some people only gave a yes or no answer and we had to ask them to elaborate on why they thought that.

Another part of my role was to edit the recordings we collected. For example, we didn’t need our question in the final Vox Pop we just needed he answers, therefore I cut out the bits we didn’t need so that all we has was five different peoples answers. Once we put the recording on to the computer I noticed that there was a slight sound issue with one of them, this was because the man we asked spoke very quietly and the microphone was obviously not held close enough to his mouth. I learnt that we should always check to make sure that you can hear what the person is saying before recording the whole thing even if it means asking them to speak a bit louder.

I feel that if we could do this again I would try to ask more people with a larger age range, as most of the people we managed to ask who didn’t mind being recorded were over 40. This would give more of a fair reflection of what the residents of Farnham felt and perhaps give a more interesting response as nearly everyone had the same view. I would also make the question simpler and more open so the people being questioned would understand what we were asking and be able to elaborate more on what they felt.

I feel that as a group we worked well and managed to get the task done. I do think we were successful as we completed what we were supposed to, however if we had more time and asked more people a simpler question, I do feel that our Vox Pop would have been better with a more interesting range of answers from the members of the public.