Vol 2, No 1 (1981)

The moderating effect of interpersonal communication on the relation between group structure and effectiveness was examined in 24 clerical groups and 36 assembly-line groups. Effectiveness was assessed in terms of output and member perceptions of the extent to which their group achieved its goals. The structural variables of cohesiveness, attractiveness and centralization of authority were significantly related to the measures of information accuracy and communication openness, but not to the measures of effectiveness. However, both accuracy and openness were significantly related to effectiveness. Those results suggest that group structure has an indirect impact on effectiveness, through its effect on the accuracy and openness with which information is transmitted among

This paper argues that social and economic pressures plus the rapid development of electronic devices will, through the present decade. produce a significant shift from face to face interviewing at private addresses, towards centralised interviewing, postal surveys, telephone surveys, qualitative research and direct data capture via specialised event recorders. The advantages of postal and telephone surveys will come to be better appreciated, and improved techniques will be adopted in both. The use of increasingly sophisticated and cos: effective electronics equipment will at first extend and improve existing techniques of data capture, but by the end of this decade electronic developments will have brought about fundamental and permanent changes in the way data can be collected.Survey research data capture techniques are going to change dramatically in the next decade, but this change can be expected to come about as the result of any single development in facilities, fashion, or philosophy. In fact these techniques will come about gradually, as a result of the changing pattern of commercial incentives and disincentives that face the individual and corporate researcher. By far the biggest disincentive is going to be the increasing difficulty and cost of arranging traditional face-to-face interviews at the home of the respondent, plus a growing awareness of the technical disadvantages of this technique.

During recent years there was a perceptible tendency towards the political and ideological use of sports journalism. The present study deals with this problem, and comprises a comparative analysis of the media coverage of the 1976 Olympic Games in Montreal by East and West German media. There is a close interaction between sports and the media, with benefits for both. Top performance sports as such is not only very interesting, but the contest for medals, cups, and new records draws the attention of millions of people. These are also the people who are interested in the products of any medium. Whereas local sports draws local audiences, top performance sports not only draws national, but also international audiences.

The author argues that there is an increasing need for qualitative criteria for media selection in advertising. A number of guidelines for qualitative media selection are proposed and illustrated by an explica. tion of Media Trend Match, a media selection system which has been developed in South Africa. A large number of factors are taken into account in media selection for advertising. Most of these factors can be expressed in quantitative terms, for example circulation figures, incidence of radio and TV sets, coverage, cumulative reach and frequency over a stated time period, and audience composition in terms of demographics and user group categories. Other quantitative factors, such as page readership, Starch and DART scores, and thoroughness of reading and viewing, may be considered. Much less attention is, however, paid to qualitative factors, and these are usually evaluated subjectively. The qualitative aspects involved in determinants of media selection should not be underestimated. While most advertisers and media users seem to recognise that the medium can have a considerable influence over the ways m which a message is interpreted, limited interest is nevertheless paid to the psychological characteristics of media audien- ces. In a recently published paper, Caffyn (1980) noted that the use of statistically reliable measures of social attributes to describe people, is a useful and perhaps even a necessary way of distinguishing between various media exposure groups. But even when this is recognised as important, very little qualitative data, on which media selection deci- sions could logically be based, is presently available. Media Trend Match, a system which has been developed in South Africa, can provide guidelines for qualitative media selection. The present paper is a brief description of Media Trend Match

Semiotics and semiology are quite different paradigms stemming from different origins. This paper demonstrates the differences and developes C.S. Peirce's notions of Phaneroscopy, Firstness, Secondness and Thirdness, explores his notion of Interpretants and applies these to the study of film. Peirce's theory is shown to be much more adaptable than the semiology developed by Metz from de Saussure's linguistic con- cepts. Whereas Metz's theory of signs can only take account of narrative cinema, the extention of Peirce's theory proposed here is able to account for all types of cinema from narrative to abstract.

In this article, which is based on data obtained from the annual AMPS projects of the SAARF, media trends in South Africa is commented on. It is observed that while the media use among the Coloureds, Whites and Asians is declining (all media except television), blacks show an overall increase in media use. This trend is observed in daily newspaper reading (although there was a slight decrease for blacks in the last year), radio listening, television viewing and cinema attendance, even though it is slight in instances. These trends suggest that reasons have to be determined for the increasing alienation between die media and sectors of the population. In a country where most media are primarily aimed at the whites, these trends also stress the need for media which will serve the interests of blacks.

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