Survey Methodology for the 2016 Digital News Report

This study has been commissioned by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism to understand how news is being consumed in a range of countries. Research was conducted by YouGov using an online questionnaire at the end of January/beginning of February 2016.

  • The data were weighted to targets based on census/industry accepted data, such as age, gender, and region to represent the total
  • As this survey deals with news consumption, we filtered out anyone who said that they had not consumed any news in the past month, in order to ensure that irrelevant responses didn’t adversely affect data quality. This category averaged 3.5% but was as high as 12% in Canada.
  • A comprehensive online questionnaire was designed to capture all aspects of news consumption.
  • A number of face-to-face focus groups were held in the US,UK, Germany and Spain to explore issues relating to news consumption and the question of trust.

Our survey was conducted online – and as such the results will under-represent the consumption habits of people who are not online (typically older, less affluent, and with limited formal education). Where relevant, we have tried to make this clear within the text. The main purpose, however, is to track the activities and changes over time within the digital space– as well as gaining understanding about how offline media and online media are used together. A fuller description of the methodology and a discussion of non-probability sampling techniques can be found on our website.

Along with country-based figures, throughout the report we also use aggregate figures based on responses from all respondents across all the countries covered. These figures are meant only to indicate overall tendencies and should be treated with caution.

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Methodology

Country Final Sample Size Total population Internet penetration
USA 2197 321,368,864 87%
UK 2024 64,767,115 92%
Germany 2035 81,174,000 88%
France 2162 66,132,169 84%
Italy 2195 60,795,612 62%
Spain 2104 46,439,864 77%
Portugal 2018 10,374,822 68%
Ireland 2003 4,625,885 83%
Norway 2019 5,165,802 96%
Sweden 2030 9,747,355 95%
Finland 2041 5,471,753 94%
Denmark 2020 5,659,715 96%
Belgium 2018 11,258,434 85%
Netherlands 2006 16,900,726 96%
Switzerland 2004 8,236,573 87%
Austria 2000 8,584,926 83%
Hungary 2056 9,849,000 76%
Czech Republic 2014 10,538,275 80%
Poland 2000 38,005,614 68%
Greece 2036 10,812,467 63%
Turkey 2157 77,695,904 60%
Korea, South 2147 49,115,196 92%
Japan 2011 126,919,659 91%
Australia 2021 22,751,014 93%
Canada 2011 35,675,834 93%
Urban Brazil 2001 204,259,812 58%

Please note that Brazil and Turkey are representative of urban rather than national populations. As such the internet penetration is likely to be higher than stated above, which must be taken into consideration when interpreting results. Source: Internet World Stats http://www.internetworldstats.com internet population estimate 2015