upon the behavior of other Americans who have been captured in other wars where POWs may have been treated as harshly but differently. In this respect, the actual situation corresponds to the propaganda theme-captured U.S. military personnel are treated as criminals not as prisoners of war.

IMPLICATIONS AND TENTATIVE CONCLUSIONS

The quick analysis that was possible of the film, Pilots in Pajamas, yields only a few tentative conclusions but many inferences for possible U.S. policy and actions.

Five conclusions were reached. All conclusions but the first one listed below should be regarded as tentative and subject to verification.

1. The film, as a vehicle of psychological warfare, is admirable. It is a carefully prepared and sophisticated propaganda production. It sets forth a pro-Soviet position without alienating viewers who may be generally sympathetic toward the United States. 2. The film's greatest propaganda impact probably will be upon groups affiliated with peace movements in the United States and Western countries and upon individuals who tend to believe that there is a "credibility gap" in the reporting of news about the war in Vietnam. Its impact probably will be somewhat less upon individuals in Eastern Europe because of their over-exposure and saturation by State- sponsored, political education through public communication media. How effective the film will be with viewers in non-Communist Asian and "neutral" countries, cannot be determined without additional analyses. There is some reason to believe that audiences in Asian countries would find some of the behavior of the Vietnamese "unbelievable."

3. U.S. military personnel in Vietnam, if they view the film, will be relatively unaffected except for anger at the treatment of their comrades and amusement at the portrayal of the North Vietnamese as humane and forgiving. The film probably will have an irritating effect on many present and former officers of the U.S. Armed Forces.

4. The weakest point in the film to Western audiences will be the emphasis placed on the fact that U.S. pilots violated their Code of Conduct by not using their revolvers against civilians to resist capture.

5. The strongest point to Western audiences probably will be the “documentation" that was edited into the film from U.S. news and television sources.

The film, its making and distribution by the German Democratic Republic, has a number of implications for the United States. Some of these implications are set forth below.

1. The film is evidence that "software" as well as "hardware" is being accepted by the Hanoi government from Soviet Bloc nations. The absence of any references to military assistance from Communist China should be noted.

2. None of the identified propaganda themes is entirely new. Their combination in the scenario for this major production, however, strongly suggests a formal coalescing of these themes into a "line" that may be expected to be repeated again and again by front-organizations and hence in the public communication media of both the United States and countries abroad.

3. Any negotiations for a political settlement in Vietnam, including the preliminary talks currently being held in Paris between representatives of the United States and the Hanoi governments, will involve the propaganda themes imbedded in Pilots in Pajamas. U.S. representatives should be prepared to cope with these themes.

4. It is possible that the film, in whole or in edited parts, will be offered to U.S. networks and individual television stations in what may appear to be as a straightforward commercial transaction. Similar offers may be expected to be made to TV outlets in Mexico and Cuba. The title of the film may be changed and the entrepreneurship may not be directly identified with East Germany.

5. The portrayal and inferred treatment of captured U.S. military personnel indicate that the Geneva Convention of 1949 is not considered germane by the Hanoi government which subscribed to this Convention in 1957. That there may be even a remote basis for this position, suggests that the United States should examine this Convention for ambiguities and, at the appropriate time, press for clarifying amendments.

6. The Code of Conduct is being used as a psychological weapon against the United States and its military personnel and is not the defensive weapon it was intended to be. Those provisions of this Code that define and limit the behavior of military personnel at times of capture and detention should be reexamined in light of the changing nature of warfare and recent medical and psychological research.

7. The legal justification for the treatment being given captured U.S. military personnel is attributed to actions by the United Nations. For purposes of the record, this attribution should be questioned appropriately by the United States in the United Nations and in other international organizations.

AUDIENCE ANALYSIS

Audience analysis also may be classified as quantitative or qualitative. Much of the output of standard intelligence analysis can be used in the evaluation of audience attitudes, opinions, emotions, and behavior. For a thorough analysis of the audience of a PSYOP appeal, survey techniques may be highly appropriate. However, in dealing with international political communications, such techniques are frequently infeasible for political

reasons.

The first two articles of this section describe the means utilized by Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty to assess the attitudes and perceptions of their audiences. Quantitative and qualitative techniques are employed.

Both types of analysis require certain capabilities on the part of the analyst. In this connection, the results of a study delineating some of the factors influencing the ability to estimate foreign populations' attitudes are described in an article by Alexander R. Askenasy.

The final selection of this part of Chapter IX is an example of the methodology employed to test hypotheses regarding the audience in communication theories applied to foreign audiences.

1. See Chapter VII of this casebook.

NOTES

AUDIENCE ANALYSIS AND PUBLIC OPINION RESEARCHRADIO FREE EUROPE*

BY LORAND B. SZALAY

Effective international communication requires more than accurate translation. People and nations have their own langauage, interests, concerns, concepts, priorities, and values their cultural frame of reference. This frame of reference is the critical factor in determining whether a communicator is listened to and accepted. RFE audience analysis attempts to derive information from large samples representing wide cross-sections of the population.

BACKGROUND

Radio Free Europe's audience research has developed as a direct

*Excerpts from "Annex to Audience Analysis and Public Opinion Research-Radio Free Europe," by Lorand B. Szalay, annex to "Radio Free Europe-A Survey and Analysis," by James R. Price, the Library of Congress, Congressional Research Service, March 22, 1972.

response to conditions and situational characteristics which are fairly exceptional in broadcasting. Three of these conditions appear to be especially significant.

a. The broadcasting is directed toward the people of Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland, and Rumania. These distant audiences are not readily accessible because of the strong social and political controls that block most of the common means of feedback: free reporting, public opinion surveys, free political elections. The people of these Central and Eastern European countries live under political systems which maintain a fairly close monopoly over all channels of mass and public communications operated on the basis of Communist ideology.

b. The people of these countries generally feel poorly informed; they express a deep interest in receiving information that is timely and unbiased. Thus, there are large, highly receptive audiences in Eastern Europe, and they are distinguished by certain characteristics which deserve interest.

c. In respect to their frames of reference, beliefs, and opinions, these audiences cannot simply be identified with the ideological blueprints of the governments or official media. Nor can they be treated as if the experiences of the last three decades did not have any influence. Although in many aspirations the people of Eastern Europe are similar to people in the free neighboring countries, they cannot simply be equated. For example, they cannot be compared with Austria, on which public opinion survey data and free election results are readily available.

Thus, Radio Free Europe has as its major audiences people that have specific information needs and whose audience reactions are not directly available to the radio station operating from abroad. This uncommon relationship between the station and its audience presents a situation which is delicate politically, complex and demanding from the angle of the communication task. This situation accounts for certain distinctive characteristics of Radio Free Europe in general and for the role assigned to the audience and public opinion research in particular.

Audience analysis at RFE passed through various stages during the past until recently it reached its present scope and orientation. In its present form the Audience and Public Opinion Research Department (APOR) produces extensive and timely information by interviews. These interviews are conducted on large samples of visitors (N≥1,000) representing Czech-Slovak, Hungarian, Polish, and Rumanian audiences and also on sizable samples (N≥800) of Bulgarian audiences. The survey data contain generally three major categories of information: Listenership data, program evaluation, and attitude studies.

Comparable information is generally available to Western broadcasting from a variety of different sources. However, the RFE audience research performs an important pioneering service as the scope of the audience and public opinion research in these five Eastern European countries is modest and the publication of opinion results is selective. In the social and

political field, the validity of the officially released data is frequently questionable.

This explains why the relevance of the RFE research is substantive not only in connection with the immediate use of these data in program planning and evaluation but also in the broader context of introducing and applying social science research to this area. RFE research traces and evaluates social and political trends in the five Communist-controlled Eastern European countries in which objective public opinion research efforts are seriously hampered by political conditions. The resulting information gap on Eastern Europe is accentuated by a similar but still wider information gap-a nearly complete lack of solid social science research data on the Soviet society, on the Soviet citizen--his attitudes, beliefs, opinions, and world outlook.1

Against this background RFE audience analysis attempts to derive solid, objective information from large audience samples, which represent wide cross-sections of the populations. Based on information and observations personally accumlated in Munich and in Vienna, a few general conclusions may be formulated. To keep the report short, the actual procedures, designs, the technical and professional details, situational problems, and limitations are elaborated in separate appendices.

THE INTERVIEW

In its present form audience analysis conducted by RFE's Audience and Public Opinion Research Division is a most significant undertaking. It represents a large-scale research effort to apply public opinion survey methods in real life situations, which requires a careful adjustment of technical-scientific criteria to given social, political, and psychological conditions. After decades of nearly complete information blackout of valid empirical survey data, at the present level of operation nearly 7,000 Eastern European nationals are interviewed every year. Each national sample (with the exception of Bulgaria) includes over 1,000 cases. The interviews are conducted in various large European cities-Vienna, London, Paris-where Eastern Europeans travel as tourists, visitors, businessmen, or sportsmen.

The fieldwork of interviewing is contracted out by Radio Free Europe to independent national public opinion and market research organizations, which employ interviewers who speak the respective languages. The rules and quotas, as well as the guidelines for the interviewers, are specified by RFE's Audience and Public Opinion Research Department. Radio Free Europe also provides the questionnaire used by the interviewer in the process of the interview. The use of independent local organizations is an especially sound decision on more than one account. First, it makes the outcome of interviews and the research results independent of RFE, which is especially desirable because the results tell a great deal about RFE, its popularity, its impact, and its effectiveness. Assigning this task to local public opinion research organizations is also

important in that it makes it clear that the research involves open public opinion surveys of the type widely used in all democratic, open societies and therefore has nothing to do with clandestine intelligence work-an accusation frequently voiced by the Communist authorities.

Finally, working independently in different locations and using more than one interviewing organization give ample opportunities for internal control, for testing the internal consistency of the results.

The actual interviewing procedure is described in Appendix 1. This description elaborates on a few technical questions such as the procedure for contacting visitors, their cooperativeness, the frequency with which interviews are refused, and other details which were considered important from the viewpoint of effectiveness of the method and the quality of the results.

REPRESENTATIVENESS OF THE SAMPLES

The quality and information value of public opinion surveys are inseparable from the question of how generalizable are the results and how representative are the samples interviewed. This question of generalizability and representativeness acquires special importance in a situation where the parent population-the audiences at home-cannot be directly surveyed and inferences must be based on subpopulations such as the samples of travelers.

As elaborated in Appendix 2 in more detail, RFE's use of large samples, numerous independent subsamples, and its attempts to reach visitors randomly to reduce the biases of selectivity are all sound measures which help to fight the odds of a complex research task.

The designers of the survey work are unquestionably correct in asserting that developments in Eastern Europe during the last decade have produced certain welcome changes, such as extensive travel to the West and reduced anxiety about expressing personal opinions. The RFE Audience and Public Opinion Research Department is prompt and effective in the use of these changes for better obtaining research of higher quality and generalizable results. Although the optimism and confidence in the representativeness of the samples may not be readily proven merely by the adapted design or research method and some of the statistical assumptions may be questioned, a considerable body of empirical evidence suggests that this confidence in the samples is not unfounded. The research findings show that the samples include not only people from all walks of life but also from a broad and varied spectrum of political opinions (Appendix 2).

SCOPE AND UTILIZATION OF AUDIENCE INFORMATION OBTAINED

The information obtained by the Audience and Public Opinion Research Departmen covers a wide variety of topics and may be conveniently subdivided into three major problem areas: