According to JICREG: These guidelines are constantly under review and are updated from time to time to both improve and make allowance for changing circumstances. Most of these changes are relatively minor.
Recently JICREG has been considering a major change to the guidelines brought about by several related factors:
• The increasing cost of research
• The decline in response rates
• The recession and associated reduced research budgets
• The need for new research on the JICREG database.
These factors have over the past year or two lead to a decline in surveyed titles and an increase in titles using modelled data on the JICREG database. This trend needs to be reversed.
After careful consideration and a parallel test the Board of JICREG has now agreed to expand the guidelines to allow telephone interviewing as an alternative to face-to-face interviewing for JICREG readership surveys. New guidelines reflecting this change are now available on the JICREG web site and will be finalised and approved by the technical committee soon. Further background to this decision follows.
The Parallel Test
The key finding of the parallel test, which was conducted in Scunthorpe in the autumn of 2009, was that both techniques have their strengths and weaknesses. Specifically:
1) Telephone interviewing is a cheaper and practical way of researching local readership
2) Telephone interviewing can’t currently research households without landlines, 20% of the face-to-face sample in the test. The extent to which this affects results depends on how similar these people are to the general population
3) However telephone interviewing provided a sample that was much more spread across the survey area and which better reflected the structure of the population, therefore reducing the required weighting.
The more clustered face-to-face sample is not an outcome of face-to-face interviewing itself but a function of the way samples are obtained for JICREG readership surveys.
4) While readership accumulated over several weeks or months was similar between the two techniques there was evidence that telephone provides average issue readerships that are approximately 10% higher.
Of course one parallel study is insufficient to produce a firm number and the fairly major differences in sample between the two samples, in certain sub-groups, also clouds the issue.
Other considerations
1) The test only looked at the basic JICREG readership questions with a few additions. In many cases JICREG research is included alongside extensive additional lists of question. These are impractical to conduct over the telephone.
2) Currently all the data on the JICREG database is based on face-to-face and some of that, along with research in the field, will remain on the database for the next 3 years at least
3) Some publishers have strong preferences for face-to-face others for telephone
4) Research methodologies will need to be constantly reviewed over the next few years as technology and people’s behaviour change.
Further work
In addition to taking the decision to allow both methodologies the following action has been agreed:
The guidelines will be updated not only to include details for telephone interviewing but also to try and strengthen aspects of both techniques so as to bring them more in line. (For example quotas and weighting)
A sub-group will be set up to consider future interviewing methodologies with particular regard to the needs of the regional press
An analysis will be undertaken when we have sufficient telephone research to see if we can understand more precisely the differences in results, if any, from the two techniques working under more stringent guidelines.
