New, improved IRS to be available by December

Big changes include doing away with pen and paper interviews of respondents and tracking movement of interviewers to eliminate fudging...

A year after kickstarting the process of revamping the Indian Readership Survey (IRS), the Readership Studies Council of India (RSCI), which is the body that controls the study, is finally out with how the new survey will be carried out.

Key changes include introducing computer aided personal interviews (CAPI) for the entire 2.35 lakh sample size of the IRS, which is the largest continuous readership survey in the world.

"This is significant," says Paritosh Joshi, head of the technical committee of the RSCI, "because earlier CAPI was carried out for respondents located in metros only. In the rest of the towns and cities, interviewers used the pen and paper method to gather data. Now respondents across the country will be subjected to the CAPI method  when gathering data."

The second big change is the tracking of interviewers via GPS to eliminate the possibility of fudging. In the past, 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. Besides, says Joshi, the duration of interviews is also expected to come down with the introduction of CAPI.

The study using the revamped methodology will be released this December following data collection and analysis which will be carried between May and November.

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.

Praveen Tripathi, former India head of media agency Starcom, who is now an independent media consultant says, "The RSCI has worked hard to eliminate the issues dogging the IRS. One will have to wait and watch how things pan out."

Nielsen is the research agency that will now work on the IRS account. It was selected last year following a six-month hunt. Agencies who were vying for the account included incumbent Hansa Research Group (HRG) alongwith IPSOS, IMRB, TNS and Roy Morgan of Australia besides Nielsen.

Nielsen will be paid Rs 11-12 crore every year, according to persons in the know, for carrying out the survey, which is released every quarter. HRG was paid Rs 8.5 crore per annum for carrying out the study.

Subscribers are expected to be charged more than the Rs 10 crore they forked out earlier for the survey in view of the change in methodology.