Hörerforschung bei Radio Liberty

Abstract

Summary In its research procedures Radio Liberty follows the same basic scheme that Deming und Pool also designed for Radio Free Europe in 1945. As it is impossible to conduct audience research in the target area USSR itself, visitors from the Soviet Union in the West are used as a substitute sample. A form of stratification-after-sampling is used to correct the selectivity of these visitors. Usually the sample size is 4,000 to 5,000. Crucial for the ability to generalize from the visitors to the population of the USSR in general are weighting procedures. The main difficulty is the lack of detailed statistics from Soviet sources. Surveys show that the citizens of the Soviet Union have little knowledge about everyday life in the West. The prevailing attitude towards Western life is ambivalence. The strong dissatisfaction with life conditions in the USSR must, however, not be interpreted as an option for Western life. It is rather a criticism of the bad management of one’s own system. Findings show that the prevailing adjustment to the irritations of everyday life take the character of privatisation, lack of incentive in public, sometime personal disorganisation, more often religiousness, and above all, pride in the international power of the Soviet Union.