Radio: What Do They Like?

What is it people like about certain pieces of music, certain radio programs? That is a problem Dr. Paul F. Lazarsfeld, bulgy and beaming director of Columbia University’s Office of Radio Research, has long pondered. Dr. Frank Stanton, yellow-haired director of research for CBS, ponders it likewise, and he also loves to design machines. Soon after Stanton and Lazarsfeld got together in 1937, they started work on a dingus that would record people’s reaction to radio programs. Last week they were ready to disclose the dingus’ disclosures.

The Stanton-Lazarsfeld program analyzer is a simple device. Subjects sit in comfortable chairs, hold a pair of push buttons in their hands, and listen to a pro gram. When they like what they hear, they push the right-hand button. When they don’t like it, they push the left button. Each button is electrically connected with a pen which draws a continuous line on a moving paper tape pulled under it at a constant speed of approximately one inch every five seconds. When a button is pressed, an electric magnet jogs the pen a quarter of an inch, keeps it off the apathy line until the button is released. Working from a timed script, researchers interview the subjects after the program, ask the cause for their likes & dislikes.

Research on specific programs revealed many an interesting detail:

> In a recent propaganda series, the programs were unpopular when boasting of America’s might or ridiculing Axis leaders, popular when giving information or pointing to the difficulty of the tasks ahead.

> A well-known program of swing music, whose announcements are parodies of pompous program notes, was found to have definite schizophrenic tendencies. It had two distinct types of listener, each enjoying about half the program. One group listened in for swing, missed the point of the pseudoclassic commentary. The other group, vice versa.

Some generalizations which researchers are willing to make after four years’ work with the program analyzer:

> Listeners are on the whole easily pleased. Very few programs, no matter how poor, provoke a majority of left-handed button pushes. (Although the program analyzer is not as yet used commercially, one network dropped a particularly atrocious show after an analysis showed more negative than positive responses.)

> About half of radio’s women listeners like to listen to commercial announcements, which they consider shopping news.

> Many a listener likes or dislikes programs or passages for reasons all his own. In one program a man strongly approved a scene about President Roosevelt’s fight against infantile paralysis because it described the fog at Campobello and he was interested in the weather. A woman liked a soap-opera villain because he always closed the door quietly.