A Question of Research at the BBC World Service Trust

This article describes the rationale and approach behind the work of the Research and Learning Group (R&L) of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC)'s World Service Trust (WST), an international non-governmental organisation (NGO) promoting social development worldwide through the use of media and communication. As the Director of Research and Knowledge Management at the BBC WST explains here, the underlying assumption of the Trust's work is that change can and does occur at 4 levels:

1. At the system level, in influencing the policies of government ministries regarding freedom of expression and access to information, there is the potential to create a more enabling environment for the citizenry.
2. At the organisational level, change management activities assist television channels, radio stations, or newspapers to move away from a set of practices that may not be inclusive of the voices of the population or are beholden to the interests of the ruling party or political or business interests.
3. At the practitioner level, capacity building initiatives are designed for media personnel, including journalists, who often lack the skills and perspectives to create content that meets the needs of the public.
4. At the audience level, television and radio outputs are created to promote citizen voice and agency or to increase levels of knowledge, shift attitudes, and change behaviour on specific issues.

The challenge for R&L is to design programmes of research to support the Trust's interventions at all 4 of these levels. R&L was established in 2005 to conduct primary research, gathering data on development issues across Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. Examples of the types of questions that animate R&L's work include:

• Does radio have the potential to shift norms about equality and assumptions about power relationships in families and village governance structures?
• Can television drama influence how young men think about their sexual practices and result in behaviour change?
• Are there options for mobile phones to be used to improve language skills and consequently the livelihood opportunities for young people in developing countries?
• Can theories of social networking and e-learning inform the ways journalists work together in countries where freedom of expression and access to information are curtailed?

It is a team of approximately 50 local researchers from a variety of backgrounds (including the academic, commercial, government, and not-for-profit sectors) that take up these types of queries. There is a strong commitment to building the research skills of the team through distance mentoring, an online network, and face-to-face master classes and workshops. In order to disseminate research findings to the broader development sector, R&L participates in academic conferences and publish with a range of academic research partners, and it is supported by an advisory group of global experts recognised for their academic work in a variety of research methodologies.

R&L specialises in gathering data from rural, remote and hard-to-reach populations. It most commonly employs face-to-face methods; where appropriate and necessary, telephone and online methodologies are also used. These include in-depth interviews, focus group discussions, surveys, and content and discourse analysis. Sampling people to be interviewed for each study is very specific and will usually be defined in terms of demographic and psychographic characteristics as well as media use patterns and preferences. The data are analysed using a variety of software packages, qualitative tools, and statistical techniques.

Each of the BBC WST's projects is enhanced and supported by a programme of research throughout the project cycle - from the formative stage through pre-testing, monitoring, and impact evaluation. Specifically, the 4 stages of research include:

1. At the formative stage, R&L explores ideas and concepts in order to establish more definite parameters for project design.
2. At the pre-testing phase, R&L asks audiences to provide feedback on the format and content of outputs in order to check that they are comprehensible, relevant, culturally appropriate, and geared toward the right audience.
3. During monitoring, R&L works to understand how programmes are resonating with the people for whom they were designed.
4. When the project is complete, R&L gathers evidence to show that they have had the desired result. Impact may be defined in terms of numbers of people reached, knowledge or skills acquired, attitude or social change, or the adoption of new practices.
   

Within this article, the 4 research stages are illustrated with cases from the field in Nigeria, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, and Cambodia.

The final section of the paper highlights a few of the conceptual, methodological, and operational challenges that R&L has faced in its work, including:

• "The reliance on theories and methods commonly used to study media and development that have their origins in a Western social science tradition are repeatedly applied in non-Western contexts. This raises the question about the extent to which prevailing paradigms in the West limit the understanding of non-Western contexts and thinking?
• As a source of influence in a society, media do not exist in a vacuum but rather as part of a complex environment of conflicting and contradictory sources of information and belief systems. It is imperative to incorporate these sources of influence into any approach that is attempting to understand the role of media.
• While the conceptual and critical arguments abound in the academic literature, there is a dearth of empirical research on many of the issues that R&L are exploring. Consequently, in many cases there are no established research instruments or scales designed to capture valid and reliable data.
• While participatory research methods...are grounded in well established theory and practice regarding empowerment and sustainability of change, their adoption at a mass or population level rather than a community context, has not been demonstrated.
• Field research capacity and technical research skills can often be limited or non existent in many developing countries. This raises a plethora of issues regarding quality control of data gathering, data entry and analysis. Conducting research that achieves international standards of good practice can be extremely difficult.
• Sampling and the construction of sampling frames, from which drawn, is complex in the absence of accurate and up-to-date census data and maps."