IRS survey process to be digitised now

The Readership Studies Council of India (RSCI), which controls the Indian Readership Survey (IRS), brings out the study for 2013 in December. The IRS, this time, would be conducted in an entire new process that was initiated about a year back.

Main changes of the survey process include introducing computer aided personal interviews (CAPI) for the entire 2.35 lakh sample size of the IRS. While the pilot project starts this month, the fieldwork for the main survey would start in May, according to RSCI.

"This time, the entire process would be technology-driven. Earlier, CAPI was carried out for respondents located in metros. But, in the rest of the towns and cities, interviewers had used the pen and papers. The entire study, this time, will be conducted using CAPI," according to RSCI.

Further, all the interviewers will be tracked through GPS to eliminate the possibility of fudging. Earlier, subscribers of the IRS frequently complained that data in the study was fudged simply because interviewers were just too tired of carrying out back-to-back interviews. It has also restricted the duration of an interview to just 30 minutes.

While the IRS will continue providing media and product consumption data as it did earlier, with a more rigorous process of data collection now in place, the study is expected to be more robust and accurate.

Nielsen has been appointed as the research agency for conducting the survey. RSCI has chosen Nielsen over agencies like Hansa Research Group (HRG), IMRB, TNS and Roy Morgan of Australia. Neilsen has been given the mandate for the next five years. TCS is the technology developer.