Norwegian media barometer

Name: Norwegian media barometer
Topic: Culture and recreation

Division for Education and Culture Statistics

Representative for the population of Norway, numbers are also published for region and degree of urban/rural area.

Annually

None

The yearly survey was conducted for the first time in 1991 and has been continued annually with updates to mirror the constant change in people's use of media. Previously, Statistics Norway has conducted listening and viewing surveys for Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation since the latter part of the 1960s. There have also been some questions in the living condition surveys about culture use since the 1970s.

Major users have been Ministry of Culture and the Norwegian Media Authority. The Norwegian Media Authority is responsible for financing the survey through the annual Fiscal Budget. Institute for Journalism has used the data frequently and the data are much used in the media industry.

The data is specially used to present timelines of the use of media over the years.

No external users have access to the statistics and analyses before they are published and accessible simultaneously for all users on ssb.no at 08:00 am. Prior to this, a minimum of three months' advance notice is given in the Statistics Release Calendar. This is one of Statistics Norway’s key principles for ensuring that all users are treated equally.

The media use survey is an independent survey and can not be directly connected to other statistics.

Volunteer

None

The population is a representative sample of the Norwegian population at the age of 9-79 years. All persons who join the survey are interviewed about their media use and access to units and media services. The interviews for the media survey lasts approximately 20 minutes.

The media survey is an independent survey. Background information is added from SSBs registers regarding education, work, income and so forth.

Untill the survey completed in 2021, a yearly national representative sample was selected of around 3000 persons between the age of 9-79 years. The net sample waries yearly depending on the response rate.

Starting in 2022 the survey will include those older than 79 years old, so that the survey will continue to be conducted without an upper age limit.

The sample size has also been expanded from 3000 til 6000 individuals starting 2022.

Telephone interview by CATI.

The data collection is made by use of computer-assisted interviews. Several procedures for electronic control of the registration of answers are included in the questionnaire. In some cases the interviewer gets a "warning" when recording an answer outside of set parameters, in other cases maximum values have been set beforehand that cannot be exceeded. Only valid answer categories are allowed.

Starting in the datacollection in 2022, the survey includes a self administered web form that the repsondents can choose to fill in, instead of a phone interview.

Not relevant

All employees at Statistics Norway have to respect professional secrecy and confidentiality. The survey is conducted under legal rules and Statistics Norway is subject to both the Norwegian data supervision and the internal safety deputy. It will never be known outside Statistics Norway what kind of answers an individual respondent has given.

In large degree there's possible to compare the yearly data from 1991, but when there is deviation in comparability, it is mentioned in the publications.

For the datacollection conducted in 2022 there has been a largely revised questionnaire used, sp somewhat less comparability in some subjects can be expected.

The gross sample is drawn in order to reflect the whole population, however, because non-response differs unequally in the different categories used, the net sample will not be fully representative. This bias will vary for different groups and variables in question. In order to adjust for some of the biases that the net sample in relation to the gross sample, figures in the tables are weighted. The following variables are included in the weighting for non-response: Gender, age, education and family size.

The uncertainty of the findings based only a part of the population is often called sampling variance. Standard deviation is a measure of this uncertainty. The size of standard deviation depends, among other factors, on the number of observation in the sample, and on the distribution of the current variable in the whole population.

Statistic Norway has not made exact calculations to compute standard deviation for the findings. However, in table 1, the approximate size of standard deviation is given for observed percentages.

To illustrate the uncertainty associated with a percentage, we can use an interval to give the level of the true value of an estimated quantity (the value obtained if making observation on the whole population instead of observation based on a part of the population). Such intervals are called confidence intervals if constructed in a special way. In this connection one can use the following method: let M be the estimated quantity, and S the estimate of standard deviation of M. The confidence interval will be an interval with limits (M - 2*S) and (M + 2*S).

This method will give, with approximately 95 per cent probability, an interval containing the true value.

The following example illustrates the use of table 1 for finding confidence intervals: The estimate of standard deviation of 70 percent is 1.0 when the estimate is based on 2000 observations. The confidence interval for the true value has limits 70 +- 2*1.02, which means the interval, is from 72 to 68 per cent.

Table 1. Standard deviation in per cent