Radio Stirling 101: Report on a Group Research Project.

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Radio Stirling 101: Report on a Group Research Project

Introduction

In an age of information, people have an increasing number of options to access media for entertainment and information. Yet radio remains to be one of the most accessible and cost-effective conventional media, especially for people with limited financial resources such as university students. However, according to the cursory observation of the researchers of this project, the radio listening patterns of and their effects on university students have not been adequately addressed. Therefore, this research project attempts to look into both the radio listening habits and music acquisition behaviors of students in Stirling University and, where possible, to identify the co-relation between the two sets of behavioral patterns. The findings of the research provide fairly clear patterns on both the radio listening and music acquisition behaviors with some definite co-relations between them. As an empirical research assignment of the Media Research Methods course, another purpose for this project is to utilize and test the basic research techniques that the researchers have learnt in class so as to pave the way for their future academic researches. Therefore, the last section of this report is devoted to the reflections on the project in different perspectives.

Methodology

The research has been conducted in a form of a series of questionnaire-guided one-on-one interviews of Stirling University students on both campus and students residences. The planned sample size is 100 with a balanced gender make-up. Taking into consideration the factor of cultural proximity and comparability in radio listening and music acquisition, the interviews are targeted mainly at UK students and some international students from other EU countries as well as North America. The research has not adopted the method of self-administered survey because the rather small sample size requires high validity of the feedback in each sample, which is prone to be undermined by the possible ambiguities in the case of survey questionnaires. Whereas, in one-on-one interviews, should any ambiguity occur, interviewers can provide interviewees with timely explanations and instructions to ensure that they do not give answers on the basis of their own interpretations of the questions.

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The interview questions are designed as two types: structured questions with singular and multiple-choice answers and unstructured open-ended questions allowing interviewees to give rather detailed account of their individual radio-listening habits and music-acquiring behaviours. The former type aims at collecting quantitative data and the latter, qualitative.(how to analyse) The 21 interview questions are categorized into three major sections, i.e. demographic make-up, radio-listening and music-acquisition with a single-question section at the beginning of each interview to identify whether the interviewee is a regular radio listener (‘Have you listened to the radio in the last one week/ten days?’).

Pilot interviews have been ...

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