The Places and Spaces of News Audiences by Chris Peters

Author:Chris Peters [Peters, Chris]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780367025373
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2018-09-04T00:00:00+00:00

Fluctuating News Audiences

Methodological Challenges of Longitudinal Research

The surveys of news media use have been conducted in a longitudinal perspective. The particular mapping of any one year is interesting in itself, but the ability to compare developments in news consumption over a span of years is even more valuable.

However, the implementation of a longitudinal survey must be accompanied with an important caveat, as the opposing considerations of replicability of the questionnaire, on the one hand, and the questionnaire’s meaningfulness for respondents, on the other, lead to an unavoidable paradox: due to the rapidly changing media-technological scenarios, if the same wording was used for the questionnaire in 2012 as in 2008, respondents would be likely to experience a lack of fit between the questions and their lived reality of media devices. By contrast, if the wording of the questions is changed, the last study will not count as an exact replication of the first one.

We have tried to solve this problem by making some minimal adjustments to the wordings used in the questionnaire, seeing these adjustments not as obstacles to replication, but as ways to ensure the “sameness” of the questions as experienced by the respondents. Accommodating the fact that increasingly TV news can be watched on other devices than a TV set, we opted for the primacy of technological platforms and changed the 2008 wording “news on TV” to the 2012 wording “news on a TV set”, and similarly for radio news. Allowing for print media to be accessed on several technological platforms, we changed the 2008 wording “national morning newspapers” to the 2012 wording “national morning newspapers on paper”. Knowing that people may go online from several technological devices, we changed the 2008 wording “news on the internet” to “news on a computer (desktop or laptop)”. In order to accommodate the role played by mobile devices, we added questions about news on a tablet and on social media (non-existent as news sources in 2008) to supplement our question about news on mobile phones (to which we added “or smartphones”).

Consequently, the findings presented for the years 2008, 2011 and 2012 are not strictly commensurable, but arguably this is the best we can do under the circumstances if we wish to undertake longitudinal comparisons of news media use.

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