Wednesday 1 June 2011

student TV viewing habits - survey results!

we came up with individual questionairres about which programmes we watched on TV and how often, then as a class we grouped together the best questions and reposted a new survey to a selected group within college. these are the results...

The questionnaire generated 25 responses overall despite being sent to 56 students. The age range of students that took part range from 16 to 21 and have an average of 17 years old, which is about the age the TV channel would be aimed at anyway.
The gender range is 72% boys who answered the questions, this could lead to bias within our experiment for answers to lean towards more male related viewing habits and interests, to achieve a fairer representation it would have been ideal to distribute the questionnaire to an even number of girls and boys.
the results show that the most popular time period to watch television is 8-10pm gaining 52% with 10pm- 12 am closely behind at 48%, this shows that late night TV is the preferred choice and this could be down to a number of reasons; only time of day free or even because its past the watershed time so programmes that appeal more to the age group could be shown at this time. The overall percentage results give us 156% which isn’t possible, this tells us that multiple choices have been made referring to the times and doesn’t give us a clear time for the actual preferred time.
The top responses in the news related questions show that world news is the most watched but only occasionally.
The top favourite genre choice is comedy according to the people that answered; the question was skipped by one person which could mean that there are more genres viewed by this specific age group. The list of genres was made specifically varied but the results have come back leaning to an obvious choice.
One the ‘your top 5 programmes’ question the majority of people answered with only one person skipping the question, personally I don’t see a reason for skipping the question altogether unless you don’t watch any programmes and have no favourites therefore a television habits survey isn’t exactly right for said person to answer in the first place. Popular choices in these answers which appear a fair few times are; Takeshi’s Castle, South Park, How I met your mother, Family Guy and Friends.
I think the question regarding the top 3 channels is useful because channels are usually tailored to tastes and finding out each participant’s preferred choices shows more for about their interests. Dave and E4 proved to be popular choices within the collected answers.
The last question was “what’s your ideal duration of a TV programme” the answers ranged from 5 minutes to 3 hours plus. 30 minutes and one hour both received 40% of the votes, i think this shows an awareness in terms of attention span, anything longer could get boring or just not be worth watching, perhaps a busy social life makes it impossible to dedicate so much time to a television programme.
One of the risks of sending a questionnaire like this to an age group ranging 16 to 21 is that not everyone could take it seriously, we won’t be able to gather evidence for this particular age group without that risk being present though, maturity levels are uncontrollable by us as evidence gatherers.