Quality Assessment of Television Programs in Israel: Can Viewers Recognize Production Value?

Abstract

Television programs' production value is highly regarded by professionals as a crucial dimension of program quality. This study examines the degree to which lay viewers, rather than professionals, are sensitive to television programs' production value as a distinct evaluative dimension, their ability to pass educated judgments on production value, and the impact of these judgments on their overall program appreciation and quality assessment. Based on a large-scale survey of television viewers in Israel, we find that production value makes up a distinct evaluative dimension, indicating that viewers are sensitive to production considerations. Production value assessments also explain television program appreciation and quality evaluations. On the other hand, there are indications that lay viewers are not very good at discerning gradations of production value among different programs and genres. These findings are discussed in the context of the conflicting interests among Israeli program makers and television channel franchisers to cut costs or to invest in the quality and production value of domestically produced programs. Based on the findings, a deliberative procedure is suggested which can accommodate these conflicting interests by combining lay viewers’ quality assessments with professionals’ more considered and informed judgments.

Keywords:

• Television Program Quality
• Production Value
• Consensus Conference
• Israel

Acknowledgements

The author gratefully acknowledges the financial support of the Israel Science Foundation as well as the illuminating comments of the two reviewers and the journal editor.

Notes

1. Israel's commercial television channels, Channel 2 and Channel 10, are regulated by the Second Authority for Television and Radio, which is a public authority that regulates commercial broadcasts in Israel. The Second Authority invites tenders for television broadcasting (and regional commercial radio broadcasting) and grants broadcasting franchises. In the present franchise period since April 2005, two commercial companies (Reshet and Keshet) have received permits to broadcast on channel 2. News is produced and broadcast by the Israeli News Company, which is financed by the two franchisees. Channel 2 broadcasts for between 22 and 24 hours each day. At the time of the study (2002), three companies had permits to broadcast on channel 2 on different days of the week.

2. The group of experts included producers, directors, writers, and senior executives in the Israeli television industry.

3. Obviously, production value is often a necessary, but definitely not sufficient, condition of highly valued programs in the eyes of professionals and viewers.

4. A well-known example is the two-in-one interest/enjoyment scale employed by BARB's Audience Reaction Service (Gunter & Wober, 1992).

5. The surveys were carried out June 17–June 25, 2002, by the Market Watch research institute, using four representative samples of the adult Jewish population. In each sample, only those who had heard of a program or seen it were interviewed further about their evaluations. All analysis in this paper beyond Table 1 is based on respondents who viewed the program at least once in the previous two months.

6. With five programs in a single survey, each question had to be repeated five times. It was, thus, impractical to include 20 programs in a single survey.

7. The figures represent the programs' ratings averaged over the four weeks before the survey. In case of daily programs, the rating is averaged over the week before the survey.

8. The scale was as follows:

1. extremely interesting and/or enjoyable

2. very interesting and/or enjoyable

3. fairly interesting and/or enjoyable

4. so so, more or less in the middle

5. not very interesting and/or enjoyable

6. not at all interesting and/or enjoyable.

This appreciation index (AI) scale is the standard scale in audience appreciation measurement, employed by the British Broadcasters’ Audience Research Board (BARB; Gunter, 2000, p. 141).

9. The scale was as follows:

1. extremely high quality

2. high quality

3. fair quality

4. so so, more or less in the middle

5. low quality

6. very low quality.

10. These questions are not analyzed in this paper.

11. The Likert-type response scales ranged from 1 (definitely don't agree) to 5 (definitely agree). The eight statements are listed below. Their order of presentation was randomized to prevent order effect.

1. You can tell that a lot of time and money has been invested in preparation, research, and writing the script for the program.

2. The program is well invested in in terms of its technical means, photography, and the set.

3. I happened to think about the program in the days following the broadcast.

4. I talked with other people about the program in the days following the broadcast.

5. I feel a sense of personal intimacy with some of the program's characters.

6. I learn from the program things which are important to my daily functioning.

7. I feel that the program enriches me culturally.

8. The program is innovative and original, and breaks new ground compared to the standard programs offered these days on television.

12. Obviously, the gratification viewers derive from television programs is not independent of the programs' production value. Therefore, we assumed a theoretical correlation between the components and used the principal component analysis model with oblique rotation. The actual empirical correlations indeed ranged between .10 and .47. A varimax rotation yielded a very similar factor structure.

13. Due to space considerations, we present the results for four typical television programs which cover the different variations of the component structures obtained. Interested readers can get the full results of all 20 television programs from the author.

14. The two programs are Jay Leno and Cultural Attaché.

15. The two culture programs, Cultural Attaché and On First Reading, obtain somewhat higher scores on the “program culturally enriching” item, but the pattern holds with respect to all other items.

16. It is interesting to note that, among professionals interviewed in the Israeli project, those who completely dismissed experts' judgments as elitist and patronizing, and most enthusiastically supported the democratization of taste, were primarily managers with the Israeli commercial channel 2. These professionals tended to consider program ratings as legitimate indicators of quality, arguing for viewers’ freedom of choice.

17. Any additional scale item would have multiplied the number of questions in each survey by the number of programs asked about (five programs in each of the four surveys in our case). This would quickly increase the burden on respondents and render impractical the inclusion of a large number of programs in the study.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jacob Shamir

Jacob Shamir (Ph.D., University of Minnesota) is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Communication and Journalism at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem