Investigating audiences’ attitudes towards local radio programs: A case study of city of Esfahan

Faezeh Taghipour, Mohammad Reza Iravani, Seyed Hamid Reza Hodaee, Allahyar Arabmomeni

Abstract

For almost a century, radio stations have been some primary sources for presenting arts, entertainment, news, etc. and the primary concern on many studies is to understand audience attitude on this media. This paper attempts to investigate audience attitude on radio programs broadcasted in city of Esfahan, Iran. The proposed study selects random sample of 600 out of 1,745,428 residence of this city where 345 people actively were listening to these programs, actively. All questions were designed in Likert scale and Cronbach alpha was 0.941, which was well above the desirable level and validated the survey. According our survey, the most popular part of radio programs was associated with news where 78.3% of the audiences were listening to these programs. According to our survey, audiences were mostly satisfied with family oriented programs and the mean score was 4.05. The other observation indicates that people have good attitude towards educational guidance programs (mean=3.37) and programs related to people and officials (mean=3.41). The results of Freedman test with Chi-Square value of 52.507 determines that there is meaningful difference among different components (mean difference = -0.23 and P-value =0.022). We have also performed an investigation to find out whether there is any difference between different components of this survey in terms of participants’ personal characteristics such as age, gender, educational background and job. Our survey only confirms the mean difference in terms of job specifications and other personal characteristics did not have any impact on people’s attitude. The other observation in our survey indicates that there is a difference between students and people with no job or housekeeper on their attitudes towards educational programs.

Keywords: Multimedia, programs, Audience, Attitude