Ghana radio stations getting to know their listeners

What is your most preferred radio station? At what times do you listen to radio? And what topics are you most interested in hearing on the radio?

If you’re living in one of the Ghanaian cities and towns with broadcasters participating in the new Our Radio! project, somebody might come to your doorstep to ask these questions. Audience research is underway.
A total of 1700 interviews are being conducted, two to three hundred in each of the regions where one of the nine radio station partners in the project is located.

Trained research interviewers have a questionnaire with around 50 questions for randomly selected respondents designed by the research organization Pragma Solutions. It was tailored to the needs of the radio stations by station managers at a research workshop held in May.

Giving a say to the audience

Mavis Akotey of Pragma Solutions, who is supervising the interviews in the town of Enchi at the western border of Ghana, didn’t need to coerce respondents to participate. “People are actually happy to be asked what they think about the radio stations in Enchi”, she says.

Gerry van Dyck, Team Leader of Pragma Solutions, adds: “Even though we are living in a democracy, people feel their opinions don’t go anywhere. But now they do.”
Van Dyck has been working in market research for around 25 years. He’s leading an organization with eleven full-time employees and up to 300 people employed on a project basis.

At the moment, Pragma Solutions is working on three projects simultaneously and a team leader went out for a week to accompany interviewers in their field work.

“That’s necessary to get feedback from the interviewers,” Gerry explains. In the field he realized that interviewers need to be very conscious about the difference between programs (which exist and which people may like or not) and topics (which people are interested in, although they might not be covered in existing programs).

Listen to Gerry van Dyck, team leader at Pragma Solutions!

Logistics of research

Every day the completed questionnaires are being sent from the Upper East, Northern, Western and Central Regions of Ghana, where the field work is conducted, to the Pragma office in Accra. And while interviews are still going on, research staff have already started counting questionnaires, extracting the answers to open questions and coding the closed ones using statistical computer software. Once that’s finished, Pragma staff will analyse the data and write a report, which will be presented at a workshop with journalists and program directors of the Our Radio! stations in Kumasi.

Author: Aarni Kuoppamäki