Vox Pop: Is Micheal Jackson Dead?

We went around Nottingham interviewing strangers on the street, asking them the question 'Is Michael Jackson dead?'. We decided to pose this question as it is a popular conspiracy theory, so we wanted to see if anyone would actually believe that Michael Jackson could be alive. We used one phone to record the audio and one to record the person speaking, and if a person didn't wasn't to be recorded, we asked if they could do audio instead of video, which most agreed to do instead. We first went up to people we wanted to interview and introduced ourselves. Then we told them the question we were asking before starting the interview, also asking if they would mind us recording them both video and audio, those who refused to be filmed, were given the option just to be audio recorded and accepted. We aimed to make the interviewees comfortable and give them control of the situation, so they have the right to consent to what we did. Also, we tried to interview a range of people of different ages, genders, people commuting and also people just hanging out. In the end, we discovered that most believe he is in fact dead, as is historically reported, however, we found that the younger people we interviewed, between college and university age, were more open to the idea that he may not be dead, maybe as a result of not really experiencing his death, being young during the period. Some even strongly suggested that they believe he is still alive and is in hiding. In conclusion, we wanted to investigate conspiracy theories and how age and generation affect the likeliness to believe such theories, and we can conclude that younger people maybe more open to believing conspiracy theories and adopting them as their opinion. In addition, our findings could suggest that the less a person experienced the context of a conspiracy theory, the more likely they are to believe it is true. We encountered issues as some answers were short, so next time we could improve by asking a better question that would provoke longer and more differing answers.