RTV Theory and Practice - Special Issue

• Journal of the Royal Slatislical Society, vol. 130, part 1, 1967: »On measuring television audiences, A.S.C. Ehrenburg and W.A. Twyman. ** ORTF Opinions, Audience de la television, octobre 1972, Paris.

The research programme, conceived and realized in this way, yields valid and sufficiently precise estimates on the number of radio listeners and television viewers, and the statistics gathered refer to about six пиШоп people in Serbia. The DB would encompass 6.3 mffion citizens if people temporarily employed abroad, served in the armed forces or absent at the time of the survey application were included. The RTB programme and audience research centre thus realized a total of nine fourteen-day series of research on the territory of Serbia with the Autonomous Provinces between Мау 1972 and November 1975. This means that the balance yielded by this survey in the past is: over 130,000 respondents, about 50 million pieces of information, several hundred villages in the Republic encompassed by the investigation. All this is carried out by the RTB centre research team with about 1,300 questioners engaged to date. We have cited these figures not to impress readers but to support the contention that the process of discovery has run parallel with the research process in a not so short period. These types of survey аге not a Yugoslav invention and have been practised in the more developed European countries for decades by research workers conducting investigations on a daily basis with a large number of respondents (the BBC questions about 3,000 people a day and over 1 million a уеаг*, and ORTF conducts polls in 400 families of about 1,600 persons over 15 years of age**). Despite the fact that several million bits of information are gathered, they аге already on the desks of editors and other RTB officials after ten days, having been statistically processed and synthesized. Thanks to precise organization and efficient processing in the Mathematics Institute, using computers, we can speak reliably of the number of listeners to a programme ог one of the radio stations of Radio Beograd or other stations, ог of the number of television viewers, very soon after the day of broadcasting. In this text we will make use almost exclusively of

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