Técnicas de estudio de A

Radio presents a number of problems in the measurement of its audiences. As mentioned previously Twyman (1994) is a seminal work on radio audience measurement and he has listed a number of problems. They can be summarised as follows:

ƒ recall of radio listening tends to be difficult because of the way in which memory works;

ƒ radio is a medium ideally suited to being used as an accompaniment to other concurrent activities with which it shares the listener’s attention, e.g. driving a car;

ƒ radio listeners tend to be mobile in that much of their listening takes place outside of their home and on radios not owned or tuned by the listener;

ƒ radio programming tends to flow in a continuous fashion rather than being a series of discrete activities or unique broadcasts which presents a challenge to the zero order assumption of the Dirichlet; and

ƒ radio is a highly fragmented and expanding – for instance most New Zealand markets can receive around 20 radio stations.

Many of these radio listening and programming behaviours work together to influence individual listener’s recall of their radio listening experiences. Often listeners can only remember when they were listening by recalling where they were listening. For instance, if they were listening at home in the morning it could be station A, whereas listening at work may be to station B. However, if they were mobile at the time of listening, or someone else was tuning the radio this may prove difficult. A large number of stations existing within a market can also render memory of a particular station listened to at a certain time difficult to recollect. In most New Zealand marketplaces over 20 radio stations can be received. This fragmentation means that not only is recall difficult, but that the audience size of most of the stations tends to be small. This in turn restricts the scale of research that can be conducted with regard to sample size and frequency.

Traditionally all radio audience measurement involves some form of recall from memory although with the increased use, in the USA and Canada, of personal people meters the impact of memory recall is minimised. Nevertheless, New Zealand’s most common of method of radio audience measurement is the radio diary and these are context related in that they ask listeners to recall when or where the listening event took place, the uniqueness of the event, whether the listening behaviour was habitual, or some combination of these elements.

Listeners often find it difficult to recall when they were listening because they tend to be mobile, radio programming is often continuous, and because listening is often casual rather than habitual. Similarly, the actual identification of the radio station to which the respondent has listened may be problematic. In support of that contention Twyman (1994) points out the in research undertaken by the Bureau of Broadcast Measurement in Canada (BBM) (1974-75) it was found that only 60% of those who reported they were aware a radio was switched on knew exactly what station they were listening to.

Furthermore, a station’s listeners will comprise a mixture of people with different levels of involvement: there will be those who are involved and give their full attention to the station, those who have it merely as background music, those who specifically chose a station and those who did not because someone else turned a radio on. Many listeners will be engaged in other activities, doing housework, studying, talking, driving, decorating, shopping, reading newspapers and so on, while the radio station is broadcasting. All the roles that radio has, as a part of people’s everyday lives, also impacts on listeners being able to accurately recall their actual listening.

Furthermore, as far as the content of a radio station’s broadcasts are concerned, programming is, by design, relatively ‘seamless’. Major changes to programming tend to happen only when there is a change of announcer – usually every three to four hours. This means that radio listening is not easily recorded into discrete segments as can be achieved with television viewing which tends to involve specific 30 or 60 minute programmes. Programme material, and music in particular, may sound closely similar to other stations with the only difference being the announcer(s).

Twyman (1994) sums these issues up by claiming that any combination of some or all of those preceding radio listening characteristics is likely to be present in any radio audience measurement. This means that much radio listening will not be uniquely recorded as a discrete event, but rather by the timing of the listening, by habits, or by programme content. This generally weak performance of recording listening occasions has major implications for the degree of reliance that may be placed on memory-based measurement. Nonetheless, within the New Zealand radio industry diary based research has been the dominant form of radio audience measurement for over 30 years.