The choice of instrument in survey research is determined by taking a number of issues into consideration. Primary among these is the availability of resources at the disposal of a researcher, coupled with the literacy background of the target population and their willingness to participate in research. It is equally important that a researcher considers his/her own knowledge base apart from those of the participants before launching a survey. Regarding this, I relied on the experience garnered during a preliminary study of broadcast journalists’ motivations for interactive programming (published, see Appendix). In this study, I took into account these vital aspects of surveys research by employing questionnaire as the instrument of data collection for the quantitative study. In my selection of questionnaire as instrument of data collection I considered, among others, the following concerns as specified by Glassow (2005): time frame for data collection, cost implication and the extent of research assistantship that may be needed. I was able to navigate through the data collection having factored in these vital issues.
While I consider all these as important during the design of my survey instrument, I also ensured that its construction was done in tandem with the focus of the study that is to assess the relationship between technology adoption and broadcast journalists’ role conceptions. I was able to follow Salant and Dillman’s (1994, p. 77-78) advice in translating the study objectives into measurable factors that addressed the focus of my study. By leveraging on my initial experience of the field, I fell considerably on the relationship developed among broadcast journalists in southwest Nigeria, particular in Ibadan the capital city of Oyo State to reach a number of the responsive radio stations and for the consistent administration of questionnaires.
Expert advice is usually recommended in developing and constructing questionnaire. For the modelling and construction of instrument used in this study the researcher enjoyed active cooperation and relied on the wealth of experience of the research supervisor. The initial guidance came through the supervisor’s recommendation to review the literature on technology adoption and journalists’ role conception. With this I was able to map out the fundamental body of work in relation to these phenomena. The recommended texts, including Schuman and Presser’s (1981) Quantitative Studies in Social Relations, provided insights to question formation, wording and contextualising the instrument. In order to minimize error that may
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infiltrate the study through scale development and considering the time and cost implications of pretest, I sought for tested scales for the concepts. For instance, Venkatesh et al. (2003) with Sun and Bhaterchajee (2014) provided the background to scale of technology adoption while bearing in mind the differences in individual, organisational and “cultural” aspects of technology adoption. Also, Weaver and Wilhoit (2007) together with Tandoc, Hellmueller and Vos (2012) and Chung, Nah and Carpenter (2013) scales were used to measure journalists’ role conceptions. Synthesising these scales into a conceptual model, developing the instrument to measure the variables, and clarifying jargons and nebulous expressions on the questionnaire were products of quality supervision.
Ascertaining the quality of the data and ensuring the instrument is conducive to easy data processing and manipulation for analysis were also considered important during the instrument development. The wordings were carefully chosen to make comprehension easy. More importantly, a close-ended, objective-focused and contextualised questionnaire was developed. In the course of instrument development for instance, the common 5-point Likert scale was extended to a 7-point Likert scale. A 7-point Likert scale yields a more flexible range of options to gauge respondents’ opinions, knowledge, attitudes and perceptions. Likewise, the study preferred a 2 to 5-item constructs to the ineffective, yet popular, one-statement questionnaire item. The rationale behind this is to increase the accuracy of gauging responses to survey questions in a way that precise measurement of each construct is achieved. Moreover, if a question was omitted by a respondent during completion, there were two more in place as adequate substitutes to ensure the constructs are properly measured.
In terms of structure, the questionnaire was sectioned into 4 alphabetic parts (A-D), with 86 questionnaire items in all. The first section (A) contains 20 statements carefully worded and adapted to measure broadcast journalists’ perceptions towards use behaviour of technologies for participatory programming. The questionnaire items follow from a combination of UTAUT core IT model (Sun and Bhattacherjee, 2014) constructs and statements. The UTAUT’s 4-grid independent variables and two dependent variables (see Chapter 4) were reviewed in the light of literature on journalistic role conceptions studies. The section (B) contains a 20-statement questionnaire items constructed after Weaver and Wilhot (2007) and Tandoc, Hellmueller and Vos (2012). The constructs in this section were based on Chung, Nah and Carpenter (2013) recent study on journalistic role conceptions among citizen journalists in the United States.
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To properly ground the measurement, a list of interactive and non-interactive technologies identified with broadcast sub-sector in this digital era and possibly being adopted by Nigerian broadcast journalists were presented as parts of the study’s evaluation. This comes under sections C1 and C2 and they are meant to gauge respondents’ likeliness to use and relevance of these technologies to their perceived roles. This would offer us an insight into their actual use behaviour. For section C1, 10 non-interactive and 8 interactive technologies were listed against likelihood and relevance to job role scales. There is an item labelled as “other technologies” which makes the grand total of items at this section 19. Section C2 contains 17 survey items designed to evaluate respondents’ technology use behaviour. Decisions are to be made on how often the listed technologies are used in their daily practice as broadcast journalists. The final section, Section D, contains a mix of close-ended (7) and open-ended (3) survey items. Two of the open-ended items are for the instrument identification purpose. The other open-ended questionnaire item elicits from respondents’ their job experience (in written numeric value), to be processed as string data. The remaining 7 survey questions are to assess respondents’ demographic data. No personal data were asked to be included. This Section D is vital for two reasons: the first being that demographic variables such as age, sex, educational status, and job experience (but excluding voluntariness of use) are moderating variables in previous studies on technology adoption. These would be used in our factorial analysis. Also, due to established claims about journalists responding to external pressures (organisational and institutional) differently, the researcher included a bipolar questionnaire item for the analysis of how different job status could moderate for technology adoption and role conceptions among broadcast journalists. Secondly, the researcher assimilated some demographic variables such as gender and status to understand the ‘cultural influences’ under terms such as masculinity and power distance index (Nistor et al., 2014, see also Venkatesh & Zhang, 2010) in order to explore these aspects of technology use in broadcasting.
4.6.1 Questionnaire Administration
The last phase of this survey process involved the actual execution or use of the instrument. The questionnaire was self-administered by the researcher and his assistant who worked in Lagos States. The procedure for administration involved identifying a key contact person in the station and/or the Head of Programmes. In most cases, the contact person proved very useful in introducing the researcher to a member of the management who authorized distribution within the stations’ newsrooms. After verbal introduction with the contact persons, official letters introducing the researcher and his mission were handed in and subsequently
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filed. The inside cover page of the questionnaire also contained a letter of consent which stated the rights of participant and emphasized their confidentiality in accordance with ethical procedure. To further encourage participation, the research had carefully designed the layout and format of the questionnaire using the University of Salford colour and crest. Increasing the face value of the instrument was needed in order to make it appealing in such a way that it would justify the essence of the research and the image of the university which authorised it. At radio stations where responses were high we were able to commence distribution the very day of initiating contact. In these stations we were able to administer a minimum of seven (7) and maximum of twenty (20), depending on their newsroom staff strength. Since the researcher could not enforce participation or compel respondent to do on the spot completion of questionnaire, the retrieval rate was fair enough for an exploratory study. A maximum of two (2) trips were made to establish contact with 29 radio stations with spread across the selected 4 of the 6 southwest states of Nigeria. The distribution was: 11 stations in Lagos, 6 stations in Oyo, 6 stations in Osun and 6 in Ogun states.
After three weeks data gathering exercise, thirteen (13) out of 29 FM radio stations contacted for the research had completed a total of 149 usable questionnaires. Another three weeks was set for the collection of distributed questionnaire in the Lagos axis. With the help of a research assistant (a first year Nigerian PhD student resident in Lagos), another twenty three (23) questionnaires were returned as completed making the total number of completed questionnaires 149. Considering a list of sixty-one (61) regularly transmitting FM radio stations in the southwest region (which is about half of the entire radio stations in the country), the percentage representation for the sample size of radio stations contacted for the study is given as 37.70 percent. With an estimate of 915 broadcast journalists for southwest Nigeria, the percentage representation of study participants (N = 149) is 16.28 percent of the population.