COMMISSIONS UNIT: (Pre Production) Developing / Researching Our Idea

Once we had decided on the idea of doing our documentary on young drivers, we all decided to do some research on the subject. We decided to use google docs to do all of our work so that we could all contribute to the files and keep all of our research in the same place.

The main things we found were that:
- insurance for young drivers under the age of 25 is the most expensive
- the main reason for this higher insurance is the statistics that show young drivers are more likely to be involved in accidents
- AA research shows that 1 in 8 British Drivers are aged 25 and under - and 1/4 of all drivers involved in serious traffic collisions belong to this age group
- young drivers haven't had a chance to build up any no claims bonus
- males tend to be more dangerous than females (especially young males)
- overall accidents have gone down (but young males still cause the most)

In order to back up our research, we also created a driving survey. We all contributed ideas to the survey, however, it was Alex who actually created the survey and came up with the majority of the questions and format. We all shared the survey with our friends and family and also asked them to pass it on. This gave us a large sample from a variety of ages and backgrounds.

Overall, we received 144 responses. This enabled us to see other people's attitudes towards young drivers and whether this follows what the facts and statistics show.

The survey showed that:
- 64% people thought black boxes were a good idea
- 48% people are completely reliant on their cars and can't do their day to day activities without them
- 56% people thought young drivers should pay the same for their car insurance as older driver (with 34% believing they should pay higher and 10% believing they should pay lower).
- 56% people thought young drivers are just as dangerous as old drivers (34% thought they were more dangerous, and 10% thought they were less dangerous)

From our survey it is interesting to see that people generally think young drivers are being unfairly punished. The majority of people thought they should pay the same for their insurance as older driver because they're equally dangerous. It is also interesting how a large proportion believed young drivers were more dangerous and should therefore pay more. Some participants expanded on their answers which provides their answers with more weight. We may use some of these statistics in our documentary.

We presented our developed ideas to Zoe in our next ideas support group. She gave us some more ideas to include in our documentary:
- crash for cash? - how is this affecting insurance?
- has insurance increased or has it always been this way?
- do we sympathise with Alex enough if we are to go with the idea of taking away his car and seeing if he can still get around?
- do we sympathise with the subject enough? - so what if you can't drive? take a bus?