Kylie Sturgess

Vision Australia Radio (VAR) is part of the Australian Radio for the Print Handicapped (RPH) community radio network providing a radio reading service to listeners with a vision impairment. Like mainstream media, it faces the challenge of ensuring the service is fit for purpose in the digital age. There is little preexisting research on the behaviour and interests of the vision-impaired as a discrete audience demographic. This paper reports on a survey of listeners to VAR in Perth, Western Australia, which gives an insight into their current listening habits and identifies some of the challenges in meeting their future needs.

Wiseman and Watt’s short scales of positive and negative superstitions have attracted attention in the literature. Using a representative survey of the Australian state of Queensland, the six scale items were applied to 1243 respondents. Initial investigation using Cronbach’s alpha showed that one of the scales did not function properly. A factor analysis suggested that a four-item and a two-item scale best fitted the data. A Rasch analysis of all the items confirmed this, and showed that the conventional five-category response format was not appropriate, and that three categories fit the data better. The main conclusion is that the results do not support the Wiseman–Watt theory of three positive and three negative superstitions. It does not seem advisable to use these scales without substantial reformulation and re-testing.