Abstract:

In the Federal Republic of Germany and West-Berlin there are three research instruments delivering TV audience data in a periodic manner: 1. Teleskopie, a panel with continuous daily measurement based on 1650 TV households with 3400 adults and 620 children; 2. The MA (media analysis of the AG.MA), an annual inter-media survey especially for media planning purposes, based on 18000 random personal interviews with adults; 3. The FMA ( Funk-Medien-Analyse ), surveying the listener's and viewer's 24 hours daily routine behaviour in two to three year intervals of time, based on 10-12000 random personal interviews with adults. Based on systematic comparisons of their results, in this paper we present the trends of TV consumption as given by the three a.m. tv research instruments, analyse their differences and describe their respective causes inherent in the different methods of these surveys.