46 | nº 31, pp. 41-61 | doxa.comunicación
July-December of 2020
The decline in reputation of communication professionals following the crisis of Valencia’s media system
ISSN: 1696-019X / e-ISSN: 2386-3978
obtained (Matas, 2018). On the other hand, the authors of this paper have also followed the technique of participant observation (Duverger, 1971), due to the fact that in recent years they have participated in numerous activities developed “in relation to the life of the group or organisation under study” (Piñeiro-Aguilar, 2015: 82), leading to the development of a field journal where the results obtained were described and analysed. The authors have also participated in the writing of several technical reports, such as the CECUV Report (2015), or as guest experts on different Committees of the Valencian Parliament that have worked on the reactivation of Valencia’s audio-visual sector. In addition, a dozen unstructured interviews were also carried out with the main heads of professional associations who, between 2013 and 2015, participated in organisations such as the MESAV (Valencian Audio-Visual Sector Board), the CECUV (Commission of Communication Experts of Valencian Universities), and the CIRTPV (Inter-University Commission for Valencian Public Radio and Television), the results of which were used to design the questionnaires described below. The surveys for 2015, 2017 and 2019 were carried out with the help of the tool known as Google Forms. The links to the forms were distributed to communication professionals with the collaboration of the heads of the organisations who, from March 2014 to the end of 2019, were part of the Valencian Audio-Visual Sector Board (MESAV), which is a space for debate that has no legal status, as it is not a professional association nor a non-profit organisation. Table 1 displays a list of professional associations and institutions that are part of the universe of questionnaire recipients. In the absence of exact public censuses, it has been estimated that the total number of respondents is approximately 2,500 professionals.
Figures regarding the number of members of each organisation are approximate, since there are no official data or exact censuses of a public nature, and therefore they have been obtained through direct contact with the people in charge and/or with the information available on their websites. It is possible that some professionals are linked to several organisations at the same time.