This post is to outline the scope and goals of my research interests on the experiential phenomenon of Flow State, and how it intersects with the activity of film viewership in a movie theater. The experience of seeing a movie in a movie theater will be evaluated with the tool sets that have been developed to research peoples real world lives and the qualities of human experience that combine to it.
The body of thought will be outlined in this series of posts.
- Context
- hypothesis, How has this not been studied
- Research Study Outline
- What we can do with this ESM dataset, Future Studies, the potential for enterprise and the theoretical implications for filmmakers
- Execution of Study
- Conclusions and Results
In section 1 we’ll look at Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who during his tenure as the head of the Psychology at the University of Chicago, he developed the Experience Sampling Method and first theorized and documented the experience of flow state. His contributions to the field of psychology are wide and vast; having been foundational to the founding and growth of the positive psychology movement. Certainly the defining movement of the new millennia.
In section 2, i’ll lay out my hypothesis that flow state is a common occurrence during theatrical film viewership and state my case. Noting how and why this has never been addressed before in specific research; it being a result of the specificity of the ESM and the adjacent research in television viewership that was happening.
Section 3 will outline the augmented ESM study developed to gather this never before obtained set of data; how audience members actually feel and what they think during the midst of a viewing experience. What makes this ESM data so fascinating is that it is weighted against the averaged pleasure and misery responses that are inherent to that particular research participant based on their already collected longitudinal data.
Section 4 will explore the genre-defining field of thought this data can lead to and the array of research topics that this sort of study brings to question. Such as how an audience interprets and experiences different edits of a film, how they feel at different times within a film, how effectively or how closely it comes to instantiating an experience of flow state and how the setting of the viewership can effect how a film is experienced.
This data could be used to inform how filmmakers should write films to match what kind of experiential outcome they desire. It also opens a massive opportunity for business services that could include market studies on the impact and effectiveness of a films experiential value to the average participant.
Section 5 will document the actual execution of the study. Section 6 will approach the evaluation of the collected data.
Flow In Viewership 