Readership data to be held back

03/July/2001

The withheld data will be published only after bodies representing newspapers, magazines and advertising agencies have had time to decide whether the methodology needs amending.

Among the most important methodological innovations, as already reported by this news service, will be the use of double computer screens in the 35,000 face-to-face interviews annually carried out by the NRS. Another is the launch of a system called Personalised Media Lists.

Double Screen Computer-Assisted Personal Interviewing (DS-CAPI), currently being pilot-tested by Ipsos, will become standard in January 2002. It involves giving the respondent a "slave screen" linked by radio to the interviewer’s laptop computer.

All questions and visual prompts used in the interview will appear on this slave screen, which will not necessarily show everything that appears on the interviewer's screen. The use of printed prompt material (cards, booklets, etc.) will be discontinued.

Each interview will begin with a battery of lifestyle and demographic questions that will enable the computer to determine which categories of magazine that particular respondent is likely to read and to construct a list of titles about which to ask him or her.

Since it is recognised that the reading behaviour of an individual may not be wholly predictable, the laptop will be programmed to include a sample of those categories the respondent is not likely to read, so that occasional or infrequent reading can also be picked up.

This technique, too, is currently being tested. The test will be extended next year with a view to applying it to the whole annual sample in 2003.

It is conceivable, said NRS Managing Director Roger Pratt, answering questions at a media research seminar held in London late last month by Admap magazine and the World Advertising Research Center, that the methodological changes may make comparisons between readership data pre-2002 and post-2002 difficult or impossible.

Other NRS innovations include the folllowing.

*A self-completion questionnaire, currently on test in London, has been developed for use in circumstances where a face-to-face interview is impossible to achieve. The 16-page questionnaire contains a media list of some 270 titles and three pages of lifestyle and other questions.

*In advance of the intended expansion in 2002 of the range of newspaper supplements and sections covered by the NRS, a qualitative study has been conducted to gain insights into how people perceive and read newspaper sections. The results will be reviewed in August.

*The NRS plans to extend its coverage of specialist magazines, beginning with computer magazines, and has produced another self-completion questionnaire which from mid-2001 onwards is being given to all respondents. Data to the end of 2001, which will not be released, will be used to segment people acording to their likelihood to read any of the titles.

*A Readership Accumulation Study, using diaries to measure the speed at which publications penetrate their audiences, has been pilot-tested by NOP with a view to sampling 8,000 adults in two waves of 4,000 each, over September-October 2001 and February-March 2002. Though the sample is considered too small to produce data for any but the largest individual titles, the plan is to use modelling procedures to generate readership curves for all titles covered.

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