Below, you will find answers to some of the most common questions regarding the Media Barometer survey. You may also contact our survey manager Karin Hellingwerf by e-mail at karin.hellingwerf@nordicom.gu.se or by telephone at +46 31 786 19 92.
What is measured in the survey?
The Media Barometer is a survey that measures the daily reach of different media. Daily reach is the proportion of respondents who state that they read, watched, or listened to a specific medium or media content the previous day. The Media Barometer also measures access to different types of media and media equipment and the amount of time respondents spent on different media during the previous day.
Who is included in the survey?
The Media Barometer is based on a random quota selection of the Swedish population aged 9–85 years old. The sample is drawn from the Swedish Population Register (SPAR) and includes both Swedish citizens and individuals with foreign citizenship living in Sweden. The sample size is calculated so that the expected number of answering respondents will be just over 6,000 people.
How is the survey conducted?
The Media Barometer is conducted as a combined online and telephone survey. All individuals in the sample are initially contacted via postal letter with login details to an online survey. Those individuals who, after a postal reminder and two SMS reminders, have not answered the online survey are offered the opportunity to participate in the survey by telephone.
When is the survey conducted?
The ambition with the Media Barometer is to reflect media use throughout the year and during all seven days of the week. The survey is conducted during February–June and August–December.
How are the results reported?
A main report presents the results both for the population aged 9–85 as a whole and for different subgroups. The tables presenting subgroups refer to age, gender, level of education, and place of residence. All Media Barometer reports and recorded seminars are published Open Access on Nordicom’s website.
How representative are the results?
The Media Barometer survey applies a quota sample. This means that subgroups of the population that tend to be hard to reach are scaled up in the survey sample. The purpose of the quota sampling is to ensure that the group of respondents reflects the total population as accurately as possible. In recent years, the Media Barometer shows good representativeness in terms of gender, age, and place of residence. In terms of level of education, the proportion of answers corresponding with a higher education has, however, been somewhat over-represented, while the proportion without a higher education has been somewhat under-represented. Since the survey is only conducted in Swedish, there is also a natural under-representation of individuals who do not speak Swedish. The results presented in our reports are based on non-weighted data.
How is the survey funded?
The responsibility to carry out the Media Barometer survey is part of Nordicom’s mandate from the Swedish Ministry of Culture. In addition, a number of media actors make important contributions to the Media Barometer's implementation and method development. These are the newspapers Dagens Nyheter, Göteborgs-Posten, and Svenska Dagbladet; the public service broadcasters Swedish Radio (SR), Swedish Television (SVT), and Swedish Educational Broadcasting (UR); the Swedish Press and Broadcasting Authority; Dentsu Data Labs; and the Swedish Publishers’ Association and the Swedish Magazine Publishers Association. Nordicom is independently responsible for all questionnaires and analyses.
Do you want to analyse the Media Barometer data?
As a researcher or doctoral student, you can order our datasets from SND, the Swedish National Data Service at the University of Gothenburg. The service is free of charge but requires Nordicom’s pre-approval. The Media Barometer datasets are only available in Swedish.