□ Blumler, Jay G., Dennis Mc Quail & J. R. Brown: 'The Conduct of Exploratory Research into the Social Origins of Broadcasting Audiences'

Particip@tions Volume 1, Issue 1 (November 2003)

Chapter 2

The Dales: A 'Uses and Gratifications' Investigation of a Daytime Radio Serial

Although the project brief referred to television viewing, a first survey centring on a radio programme was undertaken for two reasons:

1. The Dales was due to finish in April, 1969, after having run without a break for 21 years. Evidence suggested that many people had listened to this programme for a long time. It was expected that its impending termination would generate among many regular listeners a heightened awareness of the programme’s functions.

2. In the past some of the best ‘uses and gratifications’ research had focused on daytime radio serials (which had been exceptionally prominent in American programme schedules in the 1940s).[1] These programmes and The Dales had many features in common, including a largely female audience. It was considered advantageous to launch the project’s first exploratory efforts in an area that had already received some fruitful attention.

Procedures

1. A series of tape-recorded group discussions with both working-class and middle-class female fans of The Dales was held in February and March, 1969, and a questionnaire was compiled in the light of the analysis of the material thus obtained.

 2. In April, 1969, while the serial was still on the air, this questionnaire was administered by interview to a quota sample (controlling for age and social grade) of 70 women in Leeds who listened to the serial at least three times a week.

    3.  The questionnaire included the following items:

A.   A list of 42 reasons for liking The Dales, to be endorsed if applicable to the respondent – and if endorsed to be rated in terms of their importance to her.

B.   Questions about Dales listening patterns – e.g. incidence of repeat listening and number of years the respondent had regularly followed the programme.

C.   Questions about the social context of Dales  listening and about use of Dales  materials in conversations with acquaintances.

D.   Evaluative questions about the serial – e.g. the realism of its characters and plots.

E.   Questions about other media use patterns.

F.    A number of social indicator variables:

1. Customary demographic particulars – e.g. age, occupation of head of  household, school-leaving age, and religion (including frequency of church attendance)

2. Place of birth.

3. Size and position in family of origin.

4. Size and composition of present household.

5. Number of friends and club/association memberships.

6. Frequency of visits outside the home, degree of contact with friends, and subjective feelings of loneliness.

7. Political party preference.

8. Scores on a general measure of social and political conservatism.

4. In June, 1969, two months after The Dales had ended, a second questionnaire was administered to the respondents, of whom 55 were successfully re-contacted. The first-round list of reasons for liking The Dales was repeated, as were certain other evaluative questions about the serial. Various possible substitute activities were checked. And in a substantial open-ended part of the interview some findings of the first round were fed back to the respondents as a basis for discussion.

Results

The results of the study are presented below under five headings: the social composition of the sample; sample members’ orientations to The Dales; the gratifications derived from listening to The Dales; gratification patterns and social background; and changes in the outlook of listeners over time.

1. The Social Composition of the Sample

A set of social indicator variables was incorporated into the Dales study questionnaires, first, to facilitate an examination of associations between the gratifications women derived from listening to the programme and various features of their social situations, and, second, to try out certain methods of eliciting background information that might serve the project’s long-term measurement needs. The exact distributions on each of the survey’s social indicator variables appear in the Appendix: it remains to comment here on four points of interest that emerged from these distributions.

First, the family-centred character of The Dales as a programme was strongly reflected in the social experience of the respondents to the survey. Only four of the 70 sample members were single, for instance, the remainder either being married at the time of the interview (57), widowed (7), or divorced (2). Perhaps in most other respects the current family situation of the respondents was unremarkable. Naturally very few of them were actually living alone (5). Among the rest, the distribution of household sizes ranged from two to nine (averaging 3.6 members). But 38 of these listeners were alone during the day, since all the other members of their families were out of work or at school.  And although only about a half of the respondents had been born in or around Leeds, most of them resided within easy reach of one or more members of extended families living in the vicinity (only 14 not being so placed).  In contrast to the current family situation, however, some possibly distinctive features did characterise the past family background of the sample members.  For example, many of them had come from large families of origin – only six having been only children and the average number of siblings being 3.8 in a range of 1-14.  Furthermore, among those with siblings, the number of eldest children seemed exceptionally high (19), a proportion which different significantly from what would have been expected.[2]

Second, this sample of regular followers of The Dales was markedly conservative in social and political outlook. For example, when interviewed in the second round, only ten of the 55 respondents failed to mention a religious affiliation or indicated they never attended church services. And 29 of the 42 women who were prepared to state a political party preference supported the Conservatives. The fact that only five supported the Labour Party was particularly remarkable since the quota control for social grade had ensured that one half of the respondents would come from manual working-class homes. Another measure of conservatism in the sample appears in Table II.1 below, which shows how scores on a recently validated test of social conservatism[3] were distributed. It can be seen that two thirds of the Dales listeners fell in the two most conservative categories of the table, compared with only a half of the members of another sample who had been interviewed in Leeds in the same year.

Table II.1: Distributions of ‘C Scores’ among Dales Listeners and a Leeds Quota Sample

Third, despite the prevalence of claims to the enjoyment of a lively social life, there were signs that a small group of rather lonely women had been included in the sample – although indirect measures were apparently more successful in detecting them than direct ones. When asked to estimate how many close friends they had, the range of response from sample members was quite diverse, the median falling at about eight friends. In addition, nearly a half of the sample (30) claimed to belong to at least one association, organisation or club. However, when asked directly about any feelings of loneliness, the following responses to a seven-point forced-choice scale were registered:

Evidently there was some resistance to acceptance of a description of oneself as lonely, although some women were prepared to do so when offered the saving clause that they knew ‘how to get over it’.  A more indirect measure of loneliness involved a cross-tabulation of answers to two questions:

• Thinking about the amount of time you spend with your friends, would you like to spend more time with them, about the same amount of time, or a little less time?

• Do you get out of the house enough these days?

These yielded the following distributions:

It may be assumed that the women in the second group (a fifth of the sample) were the most lonely while those in the third group (two fifths) were least dissatisfied with their patterns of social contact.

Finally, many of the sample members were not only ardent fans of The Dales but heavy consumers of broadcast fare generally as well.  For example, one third of the respondents admitted to listening to the radio for six hours per day or more!  And of the 65 women with television in the house, 44 (68%) were classified as ‘heavy’ viewers, since they watched TV ‘most nights for three hours or more.  This compares with a figure of approximately 40% heavy viewers found among the members of a Leeds sample interviewed in 1964.[4]

2. Orientation to The Dales

Although the main function of the survey was to collect gratification data from the respondents, the opportunity was taken to examine some of their other orientations towards The Dales as well.

It was clear, first of all, that in most cases the association of sample members with the programme was frequent and of long standing. To qualify for inclusion in the study a woman should have listened to at least three episodes per week; in fact 65% claimed to be tuning in daily. Moreover, the incidence of repeat listening was remarkably frequent. The Dales was first broadcast at 4:15 every afternoon and then repeated the following morning at 11:15. In fact nine of the respondents claimed to listen to both broadcasts ‘always’, while 38 admitted to doing so ‘sometimes’. Thus two thirds of the sample were accustomed to indulge in some degree of repeat listening. And although the quota controls provided for a fairly large number of younger sample members (15 respondents each in the 20-29 and 30-39 age groups), a majority (41) had listened regularly to The Dales for more than ten of its 21 years of life (19 having listened for between five and ten years and ten having listened for less than five years).

A second feature of the sample’s outlook was widespread agreement that The Dales was ‘true-to-life’ both in story line and in character portrayal. Many broadcast serials are criticised for lack of realism – or at least described as if the strength of their appeal must depend on the extent to which they depart from realism. Characters are regarded as too good to be true, story conflicts as unduly stereotyped, and plot resolutions too convenient and tidy. However valid such observations may be as specimens of cultural criticism, they are evidently not accepted by many fans of The Dales as characteristics of the programme that they had patronised regularly. In their eyes a part of its appeal derived from its fidelity to a view of social reality that conformed to their own notions and experiences. It is true that in portraying the life of a Doctor’s family, certain conventions were respected and certain ideals were highlighted. Nevertheless, most of the respondents were convinced that in essence the programme did not depart from a vision of family life that could be put into practice and that was to some extent actually being realised in many British homes. Thus, four fifths of the sample (56) claimed that all or most of the episodes were realistic. Moreover, when asked to nominate, first, their three favourite characters and then the three most realistic ones, there was much overlap, more than a half of the women producing lists with at least two names in common. In both cases, however, the longest established characters were nominated most frequently, and there were a few divergences between the most liked and the most realistic characters, as the following lists show:

Third, both prospectively and retrospectively many fans of The Dales reacted to its disappearance from the programme schedules with a sharp sense of loss. When, for example, the respondents were asked in the first round of interviews how disappointed they were by the impending termination of the programme and how long they expected to miss it, the following answers were given:

I will miss The Dales for:

It can be seen that three quarters were ‘extremely’ or ‘very’ disappointed by the winding up of The Dales and that two thirds expected to miss it for at least a fairly long time.  Indeed, when re-interviewed two months later, seven tenths (39 of 55) confessed that they still missed The Dales.  Some of their replies to an open-ended question about what they missed most of all revealed the strength and depth of a typical fan’s relationship to a familiar serial:

            Well it was a family and you were following a family pattern, a family way of life and that’s all gone.  They were young people growing up and I have a son of the same age – I followed it. I do miss them, one grew up with them.

            … it was like having a fifteen minute gossip everyday.

            They were ‘characters’, educated people who talked about things that were interesting to me.

            You got used to them all, Dr. Dale and Mrs Dale were like a family to me.

Well I used to come in at 4 o’clock and sit down with a cup of tea and enjoy the programme … they were just ordinary people of my generation. I understood their lives.

It was part of my life. I don’t rush home any more. I miss the story and the friendly characters. I used to listen with my mother when I was young, it seems terrible that it has gone, it was so much a part of me and my life ever since I can remember. Gwen was like a sister to me.

A content analysis of all the responses to this question suggested that it was the programme’s projection of a well-ordered family life that was missed most keenly:

In view of these indications of the respondents’ involvement with The Dales, some of their other orientations to the programme were initially surprising. First, it was found at the second round of interviews that as many as 21 of the final sample of 55 had not actually heard the last episode of the serial (which, like all the other episodes, had been broadcast twice). When asked why they had not heard it, many respondents replied in rather vague terms, often suggesting that they might have been out at the time. It is possible that some of the women had positively avoided tuning in to the final episode of a serial that had previously meant so much to them.

A second possibly unexpected finding was that identification processes had only rarely helped to forge the bond between listener and programme. When asked, ‘Is there any character who you sometimes think is a little bit like yourself?’, only 15 sample members replied affirmatively, nominating quite a diverse range of identificands in their further responses. The attraction of The Dales had apparently stemmed more from its projection of a situation which listeners found congenial than from its portrayal of a character on whom they could model themselves. Perhaps the scripting of The Dales was responsible for this feature of audience outlook, although it may also be the case that only a minority of adults feel a need to identify directly with fictional characters as such.

Third, partly because of the large numbers of close friends claimed by the sample members, it was expected that incidents in The Dales would often serve as ‘coins of exchange’ in the respondents’ conversations with other people. Though not exactly falsified by the evidence, neither was this expectation strongly upheld, only 31 of the original 70 respondents having said that they ever talked about The Dales with other listeners. It would be interesting to know whether anything in the typical fan’s relationship to a programme like The Dales had tended to inhibit references to it in her contacts with friends and acquaintances.  For example, she might have been ‘para-socially’ involved with the main Dales characters, finding in her relations with them some of the satisfactions that can also be gained from intimate friendships.[5]  If so, such a relationship could seem rather personal to the listener – not suited to being shared with other people in her real-life circles of acquaintanceship. In fact it was found that the typical fan’s relationship to the programme was in a sense solitary, since 54 of the 70 respondents reported usually listening to it on their own.

3. The gratifications derived from listening to The Dales

The essential elements involved in operationalising a gratifications system were first devised by the investigators for use in the Dales survey and were subsequently applied, with various technical modifications, to all the project’s programme studies. Group discussions with members of a programme’s audience were conducted. The research team then listened to recordings of the discussions and prepared a check-list of statements about the programme. In drawing up the check-list an attempt was made a) to cover all types of response to the programme and b) to phrase the items using the style of audience members’ language so that respondents would tend to ‘recognise’ the sentiment expressed.

In the case of the Dales study a 42-item inventory was formulated. An experienced interviewer piloted the instrument, after which some modifications were made. The final version is set out in the Appendix, where the sample’s frequencies of endorsement are also entered. The respondent was given the check-list and asked to indicate with a tick those items which expressed her reasons for liking to listen to The Dales. Then for each of the endorsed items, she was requested to rate its importance to her by ticking columns headed, ‘very important’, ‘fairly important’ and ‘slightly important’. Two forms of the inventory, differing in item order, were administered in order to reduce the possible influences of serial position, fatigue and learning.

The first approaches to the analysis of the resulting data were exploratory in character, and (unlike the information collected for the later programme studies) they were not prepared for computer processing.  In the end a 42 x 42 contingency table was produced, which was converted by nomograph into a set of phi coefficients. McQuitty’s elementary linkage analysis was then used to cluster the items.[6]  This is a technique which assigns all items to a cluster and does not include any item in more than one cluster.  The method of assignment ensures that the level of inter-correlation of items within a subset is high and that between subsets is low.  In carrying out these procedures, the three-point scale of importance on the check-list was not utilised, all calculations being based on the endorse/not endorse distinction.  The final results of this analysis suggested that the appeal of The Dales might be explained in terms of six clusters, whose constituent items, together with brief descriptions and labels that seem to express their dominant meanings, are listed below:

Cluster A – Personal Reference 

2. You could count on it in an ever-changing world.

3. I can compare the people in the programme with other people I know.

8. Being on regularly at the same time it helped me to organise part of the day.

14. It gave me a break from chores for a while.

17. I like to imagine myself in some of their situations.

21. I can pick up useful tips from the Dales.

27. It gives me a chance to sit down and relax.

30. It helps to remind me how time is going.

32. The programme reminds me that I could be worse off than I am.

35. It reminds me of things that have happened in my own life.

37. One can talk about it afterwards with other people.

41. It sometimes brings back memories of certain people I used to know.

The dominant item in this cluster (the one with the greatest number of high-correlation links to the other items) was 32, ‘The programme reminds me that I could be worse off than I am’. Although the cluster apparently embraces several themes, many of the items (notably 5, 17, 35 and 41) seem to reflect a disposition to use material in The Dales to underline or emphasise some feature of the listener’s own life or social situation.

Cluster B – Reality Exploration

16. It sometimes helps me to understand what is happening in my own life.

19. The people in The Dales sometimes have problems that are like my own.

28. I sometimes have a good cry about something that has happened in the programme.

29. It is a programme that ordinary people can enjoy.

38. It helps me to forget my worries.

42. It deals with realistic problems without offending me. 

The dominant item in this cluster is 16, ‘It sometimes helps me to understand what is happening in my own life’.  When considered in conjunction with items 19 and 42, the central theme of the cluster seems to be the listener’s interest in using Dales material as stimuli to reflection upon various social problems, some of which could conceivably arise in their own lives.  This cluster differs from the previous one chiefly in terms of this orientation towards the exploration of problems.

Cluster C – Reinforcement of Family Values

1. It sometimes gives me useful medical advice.

4.  It’s nice to know that there are families like the Dales around today.

9. Sometimes after listening to The Dales I think that my life is not so bad after all.

13. It reminds me of the importance of family ties.

24. It puts over a picture of what family life should be like.

33. It broadens my experience of life.

The dominant item is 4, ‘It’s nice to know that there are families like the Dales around today’.  When considered in conjunction with items 13 and 24, this cluster seems to reflect the appeal to listeners of a serial that upholds traditional family values – a feature of the programme which emerged from another stage of the interview as something the respondents had missed most often after it was taken off the air.

Cluster D – Companionship

2. It reminds me of what my generation should stand for.

3. The characters have been like close friends to me.

11. It gives me something in common with other Dales listeners.

12. It gives me something to look forward to each day.

15. I can share the happiness and sorrows of the characters.

18. I like the sound of the characters’ voices in my house.

23. It keeps me in suspense about what will happen next.

26. It helps to get me through the day.

31. I can see how to handle things that might happen to me.

34. It is good company when you’re alone.

36. It gives me something to think about when I am on my own.

40. It takes me out of myself.

The dominant item is 15, ‘I can share the happiness and sorrows of the characters’. This is consistent with the meaning of a number of other items that also seemed to reflect the companionship satisfactions offered by the programme – e.g. 3, 11, 18, 34 and 36. The potential importance of this cluster is further suggested by the fact that item 34, ‘It is good company when you are alone’ (and many of the listeners were alone during the day), was endorsed by more respondents than any other statement on the check-list.

Cluster E – Reinforcement of the Social Role of Women

5. It is free from the bad language you get so much on TV.

22. It is a way of being nosey with harming anyone.

25. It makes a pleasant change from all the violence in society these days.

39. It is a programme that is suited to women.

Considered from one standpoint, the items of this cluster sound a note of ‘refinement’: the programme is ‘nice’. It has the appeal of respecting conventions that are often neglected or violated both in society at large and on a medium (television) to which many of the respondents were highly exposed. In fact the dominant item is 5, ‘It is free from the bad language you get so much on TV’. But a further interpretation, taking account of the role of items 22 and 39, would suggest that the programme helps to reinforce a specific view of the social role of women, one of maintaining decent standards on all fronts.

Cluster F – Emotional Release 

10.  Sometimes I think ‘I wish that were me’.

20. Sometimes it makes me want to cry.

Since both these items received few endorsements, no use was made of them in subsequent analyses.  Nevertheless, the items are meaningfully related by the emotional release that listening to a programme like The Dales can occasionally provide.

4.  Gratification patterns and social background

Because of the project’s particular concern with the social origins of the gratifications sought from broadcast materials, it was decided to carry out a detailed examination of the relationships between the gratification data collected from the Dales fans and what was known about their social background. For this purpose only the final sample of 55 respondents was used, each member of which was assigned a cluster score to express her orientation towards each of the Clusters A-E described above. These scores were initially calculated simply by counting the number of items in a cluster that the respondent had endorsed. They were then re-grouped into three categories (high, medium and low), the boundary lines for these distinctions depending on the distribution of scores for a particular cluster. Thus, the scores for clusters of unequal size became comparable and their reliability increased. But since only a few individuals fell into the ‘high’ category of most clusters, the analysis of relationships with social background information was often based on a straightforward comparison between low scorers (L) and a collapsed group of high and medium scores (H/M). Finally, each respondent was given a total gratifications score to reflect the number of clusters on which she had received a high or medium score.

A series of cross-tabulations between these cluster scores and the social background variables represented in the survey was carried out and is presented in the Appendix.  In considering the results two limitations of the analysis (stemming from the small size of the sample) should be borne in mind.  First, it would have been inappropriate to calculate any significance tests, and this has not been done.  In any case the method adopted, of surveying and noting the various possible relationships, was more in keeping with an essentially exploratory investigation. Second, in a small sample, there was no way of distinguishing between meaningful relationships of cluster scores to social background particulars and relationships that could have arisen from interconnections between the background variables themselves.  In discussing the results below some attempt has been made to pick out certain associations which might be intrinsically important, but any such effort is inevitably speculative at this stage. Nevertheless, it is encouraging that some apparently meaningful relationships have emerged from the data. Of course it is possible in a large-scale investigation (such as has been prepared for the project’s second stage) to control for the effects of interconnections between associated social indicator variables.

A survey of main results follows. These seem both a) to have located certain respondents who were deriving more satisfaction overall from following The Dales than were other listeners and b) to have highlighted the distinctive interests of certain groups in particular elements within the range of gratifications offered by the programme.

Total Gratifications

According to their gratification scores, the needs of the following sorts of women were most fully met by the programme:

1)      The middle-aged and elderly (40+).[7]

2)      Those who had been born into large families.

3)      Those who were living in small households at the time of the interview.

4)      Those reporting a relatively small number of friends.

5)      Church-goers.

6)      Those who received highly conservative scores on a measure of social and political conservatism.

This pattern of findings draws attention to three main functions that The Dales could have been serving for many of its listeners. First, in projecting conventional values, it appealed most strongly to older people, church-goers and conservative-minded women. Second, in presenting a number of sympathetic characters whom listeners could feel they know well, it catered for the affiliation of women with few friends. And third, in asserting the value of stable family ties, it elicited a special response from women who, though residing in small households at the time of the interview, had themselves been brought up in large families.

Cluster A – The Dales as a Source of Personal Reference Material

High and medium scores on this cluster were recorded most often by the following types of women:

1)      The young and the old (pre-30; 50+)

2)      The low in social status (husbands in semi- or un-skilled jobs).