The term Asia is used here in a restricted sense to include the countries from India to the Pacific, bounded in the north by China, South Korea and Japan and in the south by Indonesia. This region contains approximately 2.7 billion people, about a half of the worldâs population. If any single factor could be said to describe this research environment, it is diversity. At one end of the spectrum are countries where market research has yet to gain any real foothold, among them being Myanmar (Burma), Laos and Cambodia. Some, such as Vietnam, are at the emergent stage. But most have research industries of several decadesâ standing, the full range of research services, and sampling and research methodology as sophisticated and variegated as western practice. The countries in this region certainly vary widely in the challenges they present for general population sampling, which are described below under five headings: 1. population characteristics; 2. information sources; 3. selection methods; 4. practical issues; 5. response rates.
Jakarta has experienced huge gains in urban and economic development over the last ten years. The megacity now houses a substantial and affluent middle class with lifestyles in line with those of the Asian tigers. Their reading habits and value to advertisers have been monitored by Survey Research Indonesia for many years through the Media Index and Asian Profile services. But achieving the identification, contact and cooperation of this segment has become increasingly difficult due to a combination of the growth of condominia and gated housing, more time spent away from the home (not least owing to the traffic jams) and a correspondingly greater value placed on leisure time. Failure to tackle these issues would inevitably result in under-reporting of the TRUE size and profile of this segment. Over the last two years, SRI has developed and tested a range of innovative procedures designed to identify and correctly represent this market and has incorporated a number of these in its media measurement services to the benefit of media owners and advertisers alike.
The economy in China is growing at an unprecedented rate. It is forecast that its GDP will overtake the USA by the year 2030. While agricultural output is threatened by mass migration to the cities, the industrial, retail and financial sectors are booming. In this paper, we look at the situation in the retail sector and the way that market research is both responding to - and driving - its development. In 1992 SRG China established retail audits and distribution checks for multinational clients in the largest cities - Shanghai, Beijing and Guangdong. By late 1993 the choice lay between expanding this to more and more cities, which would still not provide total market estimates, or going for a truly national measurement. The latter path was chosen and so began the first national market research programme in China and some of the largest country surveys anywhere in the world. A national retail audit required national retail universe information. Some official statistics on the size and geographical distribution of the retail sector were available, but were neither complete nor up-to-date, and did not identify the profile in terms of the different distribution channels and shop types. A retail census was the only answer. Since it was believed that at that time China had more than ten million shops, it would not be possible to visit them all. We designed a sample census covering a quarter of the 500 cities in China and a further sample of towns. Probability sampling was adhered to as being the only way of ensuring unbiassedness and target levels of sampling error were set in advance. Fieldwork was carried out by a force of 4 university students from 50 universities, supervised by their professors and lecturers, both groups being personally trained by SRG staff. This was augmented by a number of fieldwork agencies. There was a rigorous programme of back-checking and back- checking on the back-checking (all of which proved vital). More than a million shops 251 were visited during the summer of 1994. The projections were good and met the target levels of precision. In the paper we outline the difficulties faced both in designing the sample and in fieldwork execution - which included regional dialects, earthquakes, typhoons, floods and occasional downright hostility.
Peoplemeter panels have been the principal tool for measuring TV audience behaviour for about ten years now, yet there is no universal agreement on the right way of running such a panel. Although bodies such as EAAA and EBU have started to explore the issue of harmonisation, many key areas have not yet been fully explored, while practice on other continents continues to differ in many ways. While different metering systems differ electronically, there are now many meters all of which provide the same basic research functions of monitoring station tuned and viewership via a remote handset. But there is much disparity, some of it long-standing, in the area of panel management. Three examples are given: the use of a claimed weight of viewing control; measures of and remedies for unpressed buttons; and the use of enforced rotation. Finally, many innovative and valuable methodological research methods have been devised yet they have not always been adopted elsewhere. This paper reviews where we are and how we got here, and asks where the heavens we're going.