|
How
are radio audiences measured?
An
organisation called the Radio Joint Audience Research Limited (RAJAR)
is responsible for going out to households across the country, and asking
people to keep a
diary of listening for
seven days. Approximately 130,000 diaries a year are completed. Respondents
are asked to record which stations they listened to at what times, and
also where they were listening.
The
diaries are collected and processed, and then every three months a quarterly
set of audience figures for each station is released. Where a station
is local rather than national, it is able to find out how it has done
in its particular transmission area, rather than being lost in the national
figures.
RAJAR
is jointly owned by the Â鶹Éç and the Commercial Radio Companies Association,
and its research is carried out by a company called IPSOS-RSL. It was
founded in 1992 to establish an industry standard for audience measurement,
which would not be in-house or prejudiced towards certain stations. You
can find out more about RAJAR at its website:
(The Â鶹Éç cannot be held responsible for the content of
external websites)
 |
| The front of
a RAJAR diary. |
Although
data is released every three months, most of our Â鶹Éç Local Radio stations
rely on six months of data at a time, because their smaller transmission
areas require longer to establish a reliable sample from the diaries.
It's only national stations and the stations based in heavily populated
areas (like London or Manchester) that tend to use three months of data.
Ìý
|
