The word “media” is being used in its general sense, during this discussion, to refer to a means of communication (and not confined to published means like newspapers or radio). In making plans for gathering primary data, a basic question for the researcher is: What attributes should the communication method have to obtain the desired information accurately and efficiently? (That is, what are the key criteria in choosing the medium in this study?)
We are going to discuss the chief media, with strengths and weaknesses of each. Before that, consider two general aspects:
- What degree of structure is desirable?
- What degree of disguise is required?
A structured formal method standardized the questionnaires to be used in gathering the data. The question would be printed so that interviewers will ask them exactly as given. The answer categories may be standardized and printed also. The contrary, or informal, interviewing approach leaves the wording of questions to interviewers’ discretion. Answer categories are unstructured when the respondents (people interviewed) are free to word their replies. The degree of structure would dictate which media to use.
Disguise is the concealing of purpose or sponsorship of a study. This may be fair, as well as desirable, when used to avoid people slanting their answers when those aspects are revealed. However, it would be unethical when respondents are misled into divulging information that they would refuse if actual sponsorship was revealed.
An example of legitimate disguise was in a National Broadcasting Company survey of factors that underlie aggressive behaviour among teenage boys. It was evident that should the boys be aware that the questions were seeking links between TV exposure and aggressive behaviour, they would either slant replies or refuse to answer the questions. This outcome was avoided by describing the purpose as a study to find out what boys their age were really like.
There are various attributes, of the media that might be used for gathering information that may be the criteria used for choice among them. We will list ten such criteria.
- Bias freedom (from interviewer’s effects)
- Control over data collection
- Depth of questioning possible
- Economy, or low cost per response obtained
- Follow-up ability, to reach those not responding
- Hard-to-recall information obtainable
- Rapport, or ease of establishing a good relationship with respondents
- Sampling, or completeness of covering desired population
- Speed of obtaining responses
Versatility, or ability to use a variety of questioning methods of course, one would like to find a communication method with all those attributes. Actually, each method is going to be deficient in some of them. For that reason, a researcher should have decided on the right criteria before evaluating the alternative media. We will comment on each medium’s virtues and faults, with respect to those criteria.
Selecting the Media: In considering which of the plausible communication methods to use more than the foregoing criteria should be considered carefully Practical consideration of the people or sources of information and of such factors as the time required and the costs is needed too Next we will look at the three main categories of media and subtypes within them, starting with personal contact with data sources.
Personal: The personal medium is that of an interviewer being face to face with the respondent (the data source). This was the traditional medium, and it may take place in various types of locations. We will speak first of interviewing at a subject’s home.
Home interviews, if obtainable, tend to find the respondent at ease and perhaps with ample time for extensive questioning. Home interviews are advantageous in the versatility of questioning – for instance, either structured or unstructured – as well as the showing of scales or such other visuals as lists and pictures, since respondents can see them. In addition, interviewers can see when respondents misunderstand questions. Also, observing the situation may yield significant information. Too, a better rapport with the respondent may be gained. But the personal medium may have serious faults, including bias from obtrusion of the interviewer and the time involved in locating and gaining willingness of the respondent. We summarize some pros and cons:
| Favorable | Unfavorable |
| By physically being there, the interviewer may persuade the person to supply answers. | Travel time and expense to find respondents is often excessive. |
| Information on the situation may be observed, without asking. | People are becoming more reluctant to talk with strangers. |
| Questioning methods and use of visual materials may be varied. | Interviewer’s presence, mannerisms, and inflections may bias responses. |
| Long questionnaires may be used successfully under interviewers’ urging. | Respondents know that they can be identified, which may inhibit their willingness to give information. |
| If respondent is having trouble understanding, interviewer may notice and remedy this. | Difficulty is encountered in trying to supervise and control filed interviewers. |
| Selection of sample members can be more precise. | Staffing with capable interviewers, especially when conducted in distant places, is difficult. |
Variants is personal interview methods are preferable to structured home interviews in many cases. The cost and time of going to respondents’ homes are avoided by encountering them elsewhere. So-called traffic interviews may be held on streets, in public buildings like air terminals, and in other places where many people are passing. Election polling is virtually forced to use this approach to make quick measurements to forecast voting, but obviously only short queries can be used with people on the move.
A form of traffic interviews that has become second in frequency of use is the mall intercept. Staging surveys in shopping malls takes them to the most popular gathering point of today’s consumers. The research agency that is making the survey usually rents space in the mall adjacent to the point of intercepting possible respondents. Short screening interviews may be held out in the mall, and then selected respondents can be brought into the interviewing facility where longer interviews can take place, using films, simulated stores, and other aids. Lower costs and more control over selection of respondents are afforded. This method, like all traffic interviewing, can be flawed by the inability to include a full cross section of the desired population.
Another variant is to substitute self-administered responses for the normal question-and-answer method. The question forms are simply handed to respondents, who are to fill them out and return them. It clearly is best to have this take place right where respondents are met. If instructions are clear to all – and the subjects are willing to do this task – savings are likely. Only wholly structured questions can be used, and answer categories may have to be structured too since few subjects would be willing to write in their free responses.
The opposite of structure characterizes depth interviews. In these, only some introductory and classification questions may be formally printed on the interviewing form. For the principal information, interviewers are given guidelines to conducting informal questioning. The intent is to elicit information through probing with a series of questions determined by interviewers on the spot, going to depths of memory or the subject’s psyche. If well conducted with cooperative respondents, much may be learned about attitudes and experiences that no other method may obtain. Responses may be stimulated with projective techniques that cause subjects to bring out their own personalities as they respond to ambiguous situations presented to them with visual aids. Against the benefits of the unstructured probing are a number of dangers in lack of control, bias, costs and small samples that may be unrepresentative.
The varieties of personal communication methods just described illustrate some alternatives to the formal at-home interview that were traditional. That method suffers from problems of finding people at home, of their reluctance to talk with strangers there, of intrusion of the interviewer into the situation, and of lack of supervision. Each alternative, of course, must be considered in relationship to the peculiar needs of each study. Now we will look at the telephone and mail media, after which the three media will be compared.
Telephone: The most convenient means of reaching survey respondents is clearly the telephone. This depends on their having home phones. Since those people tend to do have home phones tend to be the more affluent, the small minority without phones causes no serious error in most surveys’ coverage. Low-income, single or transient people without telephones are significant segments in many studies, however, and telephones would be a deficient medium in these cases.
The cost and time of reaching remote people by long-distance phoning used to be cited as a deficiency of this medium. That has been overcome by volume discounts and wide-area services throughout the United States and Canada. These generally are called “WATS lines,” although that is a trade name of the AT & T system, but comparable services also are offered by its rivals (such as Sprint or MCI). Modern field research firms now have central offices where a large number of wide-area phones are Favourable Unfavourable directly supervised. They now heavily use telephone surveys, which justifies that investment.
Another great advance has been gained from the combination of computers and cathode ray tubes, which are like television sets in placing a console screen in front of the interviewer. The computer can store banks of telephone numbers and questions with answer categories. Thus the desired phone numbers are automatically dialed, and each question in flashed before the interviewer in sequence The interviewer becomes free to concentrate on communication with the people called, and responses are processed by computer.
There can be severe drawbacks in the telephone medium. One is inability to show anything visual to a respondent. Who must be able to conceive of the purpose, the questions, the questions, and the forms of answer desired wholly by listening? An interviewer must be able to establish rapport with the unseen persons at the other end and to sense and cope with problems in the situation without seeing it. Long interviews are tedious, and unlisted phones are a problem to overcome. The pros and cons of telephone media mainly are these.
| Favourable | Unfavourable |
| Dialing respondent’s phone number is efficient, especially when a number of callbacks are needed. | Respondent and his or her communication problems cannot be observed. |
| Personal travel to place of interviews is avoided. | Interview is limited to audio materials. Precluding everything that has to be seen. |
| Respondent does not have to open door to stranger. | Retaining attention for long interviews is difficult; there is no way to prevent the interviewee from hanging up the phone. |
| Coverage of even widely scattered sample is repaid. | Respondent cannot see interviewer, so may be suspicious or house. |
| Distance is no obstacle or serious cost with WATS lines. | Only homes with telephones may be reached. Problems arise with unlisted numbers and lines out of order. |
| By interviewing from one central point, supervision and training can be excellent. |
Mail: The postal service will deliver questionnaires to an address, where the probability of receiving it is high. The respondent may answer at leisure when thought can be given to pondering answers or data may be looked up in records to give accuracy. With anonymity assured, a person may feel willing to tell about confidential matters that would never be divulged to a person interviewing. Almost any sort of printed material can be mailed. Costs amount only to those of address lists, printing, postage, and handling.
The negatives are considerable, however, particularly that responses may be slow in trickling in and that the majority of addresses may never be hard from. Unless current mailing lists of the types of persons or organizations sought are available, a proper sample may be impossible. Respondents may become very confused about instructions, and people of low literacy may not even try. We would say that the major points for and against the mail medium are these.
| Favourable | Unfavourable |
| Respondent reads and answers questions without being influenced by interviewer. | A majority may not respond, and those that do may not be typical. |
| Interviewee may respond whenever convenient and without any pressure. | Weeks and longer may pass before the bulk of responses are received. |
| Addresses may be widely dispersed and include persons inaccessible by any other medium. | Nothing can be learned about respondent and situation except what he or she writes on the questionnaire. |
| Any visual materials can be used. | The apparent low costs become relatively high when response is poor. |
| Cost is confined to mailing lists, forms, and postage. | No one present to stimulate replies or offer instructions |
| More confidential information may be divulged. | A person will read the entire from before answering any questions, so later questions can influence answers to earlier ones. |
The drawback of low response rates can be overcome through mailing to an established panel of respondents. A number of research organizations have created and maintain panels of consumers, with as many as 75,000 names to draw from and with consistent records of obtaining 70 to 85 percent response rates. Some of these panels maintain diaries, which makes detailed purchase records available. Since panel members are so likely to respond, more costly materials such as product samples can be afforded than is true in ordinary mail surveys with their likelihood of low responses.
MARKETING RESEARCH: Com passions of the Media In the planning of each marketing research project, the choice of the best communications media rests on a number of considerations. This choice should be made on explicit criteria. We set forth ten factors to consider on page 104. Now that we have discussed the nature of the three principal methods that may be used for questioning, they are compared in Table 6-1 with regard to the same ten factors.
These rankings should not be interpreted too literally, because this table compares only three media in general. If all the forms of personal interviews and if observations were included, that would more than double the columns. Special factors might have to be considered, in many cases. And there are situations in which medium for gathering primary data. Table provides some crude comparisons for making the choice.
Combinations of Media: A single study is not limited to using only one of the communications media. When project has more than one phase or purpose, a different medium
| FACTOR | MEDIUM | ||
| PERSONAL | TELEPHONE | ||
| Bias freedom (from interviewer) | 1 | 3 | 2 |
| Control Over collection | 3 | 2 | 1 |
| Depth of questioning | 3 | 1 | 2 |
| Economy | 2 | 3 | 1 |
| Follow-up ability | 3 | 2 | 1 |
| Hard-to-recall data obtainable | 1 | 2 | 3 |
| Rapport with respondent | 3 | 1 | 2 |
| Sampling completeness | 3 | 1 | 2 |
| Speed of obtaining responses | 3 | 2 | 1 |
| Versatility to use variety of methods | 2 | 1 | 3 |
May be appropriate in each Or there are situations in which use of more than one medium commercials to both the volume of various brands sold through retailer and to the purchasing by several consumer market segments. Choice of communications media are.
Observation and mail: A beverage manufacture wants to relate the viewing of its television commercials to both the volume of various brands sold through retailers and to the purchasing by several consumer market segments. Choice of communications media are
| Observation: | To measure mechanically the TV viewing patterns of selected families. To measure manually the sales of all brands through stores in the areas being studied. |
| Mail questioning | To obtain consumers’ reports on their beverage purchases. |
Telephone and mail: A cosmetics manufacturer selling directly to the home needs to learn about the representatives. Past studies have shown difficulty in persuading many women to be cooperative in interviews and also in finding them at home.
Mail Questioning: Sending a letter to gain consumer’s confidence and rapport together with a post card to tell when the consumer would find a call convenient`. (Offer a premium incentive to reply). Telephone questioning: To obtain from the consumer the desired data.
Telephone and personal An airline wishes interviews in some depth with business travelers who are in certain types of managerial and technical positions and who travel frequently in certain regions.
Telephone Questioning: To screen individuals to qualify them for interviewing, to gain their interest, and to agree on specific time for holding interviews. Personal questioning: To conduct depth interviewing of the selected people at the appointed time. These are merely illustrative of useful combination of media.
Formulating a Data Plan: We have discussed four stages in determining the data needs and gathering, individually actually, of course, this planning should not be piecemeal, deciding each stage in isolation. Rather, one united plan is to be fashioned, which would fulfill the data objectives. The work of combining these four aspects into an integral plan is intricate, and each plan is situation specific—decided uniquely for each study.
We will indicate what may be comprised in a data plan. Three actual marketing studies are described in terms of four major phases: (1) setting data objectives, (2) deciding the appropriate type of data, (3) defining sources of the data, and (4) selecting the communication approach. Only a portion of the information that would be wanted can be discussed in a reasonably brief space here.
