What Determines Recreational Television Behaviour of People? A Study With Reference to the Gampaha District

Abstract

Although the television industry carries great importance in micro and macroeconomic aspects and supports a great demand as a recreational or leisure source among people, it seems that the television industry is lagging behind its actual capacity and is widely contributing to the domestic GDP. Less effective management and poor identification of choices of people has driven the industry toward poor conditions. Therefore, this study contributes to identify the factors that support the television program preferences of people, selection of public or private channels and time spent in front of the television. These identifications would indeed help the television industry to achieve maximum capacity while competing effectively in an oligopolistic market and achieving higher contribution to the national GDP. In order to obtain the statistical analysis, primary data has been gathered from four Grama Niladari Divisions of the Gampaha Divisional Secretariat in the Western Province, Sri Lanka. Simple random sampling procedure has been carried out in the sample selection process and data has been gathered from 609 individuals in 168 households; from February 2015 to April 2015, to identify determinants of programme preferences and public/private channel choices, the binary logistic regression model has been applied. The semi log regression model is used to identify the determinants of television watching hours of the people. Results in the binary logistic model of programme preferences emphasize that old, male, married and employed individuals are showing more interest in news and knowledge related programmes while creating positive significant relationships with the news and knowledge based programme demand. When a person is being employed, public channels were mostly preferred creating significant positive relationship while when a person is having specific political norm, they prefer mostly private channels and create significant negative relationship in the model. Regarding the hours allocated for watching television by the people, age, marital status and employment status shows positive relationships within the model. Considering the employed segment; when a person has more than 8 hours of working time, it shows a significant negative relationship with television watching hours. In descriptive statistics, it shows that old and middle aged people are more interested in watching news and politics related programmes while females mostly prefer programmes containing soft content such as tele-dramas and religion based programmes. Considering news preference in separate, Him TV was leading among other channels. “Atapattama” on ITN was the most preferred knowledge based programme followed by “Doramadalawa” on ITN. “Satana” programme on Sirasa TV was the mainly preferred political programme among individuals. On the other hand, when it came to tele-dramas, the largely favoured Indian mega dramas were “Me AdarayaF and “Sapna”, telecast by Sirasa TV. “Hiru CountDown” was leading among the respondents when it came to their most preferred musical programmes.