MRG MEETING – READERSHIP RESEARCH
Last night’s MRG meeting was devoted to 3 papers from the Sixth Worldwide Readership Symposium held in San Francisco in April. The papers were;
Quality of Reading Measures Assessed by Qualitative Research – Hilary Cade of RSL Media
Quantifying the Qualities: Should We Measure Contacts or Relationships or Both? – Chris Minter of Readers Digest
Audience Accumulation and the Link With Print Effectiveness – Dick Dodson of Telmar
Summaries of the other 2 papers will follow shortly.
Forthcoming MRG meetings include an evening examining Radio and Rajar in October and an evening entitled “The Cost of Media Research” in November. The dates for these have yet to be finalised.
Hilary Cade (RSL Media) presented a paper entitled;
“Quality of reading measures assessed by qualitative research.”
Cade began by highlighting the fact that the industry as a whole has been calling for more qualitative press research for some time. She then identified 3 questions faced by those developing qualitative research;
1) How to develop questions which indicate quality of reading ?
2) How to ensure the questions are meaningfully answered ?
3) How to ensure the questions are appropriate to different publications but that they can also successfully discriminate between them.
Cade believes talking and listening to readers should play a part in any readership research.
She then went on to discuss the findings of the NRS Quality of Reading Working Party. Stage 1 of the Working Party identified several different reader types, such as the information reader and the relaxation reader. It also identified different reasons forreading such as habit or obligation. The importance of the reading environment was highlighted in the findings. The Working Party concluded that questions used in qualitative research must take account of different types of respondents reading different types of publications in different environments.
Stage 2 of the Working Party comprised a field study involving a shortened NRS interview with respondents, an in-depth discussion, quality of reading questions and a discussion of the questions. For some of the respondents the in-depth discussion preceded the quality of reading questions while for others the order was switched. The purpose of this was to establish if ‘warming up’ respondents had any effect on their answers.
The results showed that behavioural questions were easily understood and were answered without hesitation. Some attitudinal questions were less successful. An example being “Would you say …. is one of your favourite publications?” The polarity of a yes/no answer was found to be too extreme in this case. This question also produced varying responses between men and women with men more reluctant to refer to a publication as a ‘favourite’ than women. Questions that required a calculation from the respondents were also found to be difficult to answer. Frequency of reading was perceived differently by different respondents. Some who read a daily newspaper every Saturday (but not Monday to Friday) saw themselves as regular readers of a daily newspaper. Time spent reading proved to be a difficult question which required heavy prompting.
A third stage of the Working Party has recently been carried out amongst users of the data; sales staff in media owners and planners in agencies. The results of this will be released shortly. Cade concluded by saying there is clearly a need for qualitative research to supplement reach and frequency data but questions need to be asked in readers terminology.