doxa.comunicación | nº 28, pp. 241-260 | 247
January-June of 2019
María José García-Orta, Victoria García-Prieto and Miriam Suárez-Romero
ISSN: 1696-019X / e-ISSN: 2386-3978
Is their consumption similar to that of young people between the ages of 18 and 25, where fiction, specifically television series, is the main focus? What degree of interaction do minors have when they consume videos or audiovisual content online? Is on-demand consumption complementary, or does it replace linear consumption?
All of these questions are the basis of two hypotheses:
H1. The consumption of audiovisual content in online platforms by minors focuses on entertainment, but they still continue to play a passive role in the communication process.
H2. Minors may be consuming cultural content unsuitable for their age, namely fiction series, without the appropriate control by the agents involved.
In order to achieve the objectives set and the working hypotheses, two different phases of qualitative research have been used: documentary research and surveys. In the first stage, the collection of information was carried out through bibliographic documentation, especially in reference to consumer behaviour of audiovisual content, articles in magazines of the sector, as well as different studies or reports related to television consumption in Spain.
With regard to the second phase, the use of a survey was chosen as the most effective research technique for achieving our objectives. In this regard, and thanks to standardized procedures, a survey allows for the collection and analysis of data from a representative sample of cases from a wider population for the purpose of describing and/or explaining a series of characteristics (García, 1993). This technique fits perfectly into the type of methodology used in this work, a transversal descriptive or prevalence method, as we have analyzed the frequency of audiovisual consumption at the present time.
For this purpose, simple random sampling has been used. Given that the study is an approximation to changes in consumption, 100 questionnaires were initially set up for students between 14 and 17 years of age, although in the end our sample consisted of 111 minors.
In order to gain access to this segment of the population, we selected a Secondary School with both upper and lower educational levels. The centre was chosen mainly due to proximity criteria, and its name is Néstor Almendros Secondary School, located in the municipality of Tomares, in Sevilla. This is a centre with more than 1,700 students that includes 23 lower secondary groups and 12 upper secondary groups (four of them for adults), a secondary education group for adults (by distance learning), and 18 vocational training groups.
The next step in the research was to design the questionnaire, and the choice was made to combine fixed-response questions with multiple-choice questions (range of answers with an open item), and open-ended questions. The questionnaire was designed through the US platform known as SurveyMonkey.
After having contacted the school’s administration, it was decided that the questionnaires would be printed using as mediators the form tutors of the 4th year Lower Secondary School groups and those of the 1st year Upper Secondary School, since these were the educational levels that matched the age groups of our study. The survey was carried out with a total of 8 groups (an average of 30 students per class) during the week of 18 to 22 June, coinciding with the end of the academic year, a period with an added difficulty: absenteeism of many students. This made it necessary to repeat the