Public awareness and the role of media: an Italian survey on the 6 billion day = 6 miliardi di abitanti: opinione pubblica e media in Italia

This report attempt to answer to the following questions: how public opinion and demographic information interact? How this information is transmitted by the media? In Italy most people have a very scarce and uneven knowledge about population issues, because our society has not developed a solid demographic culture, able to communicate knowledge in this field. In addition, the sources of information available to the general public are generic articles and programs distributed by the media. Only scholars and students have access to more articulate information. In the days immediately preceding publication of the UNFPA Report on the world population of 6 billion on 22 September 1999, IRPPS conducted a survey on 1000 Italians about the main population trends in the world, in Europe, and in Italy. A second survey made at the end of October 1999 was undertaken to understand how far general public are interested in these questions and exactly what information, filtered though the media, actually contributes to their attitudes. The survey had several purposes: to gain a clearer understanding of what Italian public knows about world demographic trends and what sources uses to build demographic knowledge; to assess the role played by media communication on knowledge and attitudes toward population issues and to analyse the contents on the information supplied by newspapers and TV broadcasts. The first part of the paper concerns the assessment of the impact of the media on knowledge about the event, the analysis of the ways in which people put the information to use, their learning strategies, and the characteristics of the various segments of the population which participated in the survey. To achieve those results, after a descriptive analysis treatment, answer trees technique is applied to identify the "knowledge profiles". The tree allows to identify the most interesting profiles rapidly. A second aim of this work is to know what information is communicated, how the media treat demographic information, the balance given to articles and broadcasts, how deeply questions are probed. The method used in this second part of the paper is the Textual Analysis technique of press articles and texts of TV news broadcasting on "day 6 billion", collected ad hoc. Textual Analysis is a statistical approach to the study of linguistic sources, using methodologies developed from quantitative tools of qualitative analysis. In our case we used different techniques: correspondence analysis, cluster analysis and analysis of the specificity of forms and phrases of a text according to the frequency with which they occur.