Mediamark Research To Fully Integrate Hispanic Consumers Into National Survey.

Mediamark Research Inc. has begun to use Spanish-speaking interviewers to survey Hispanic/Latino consumers in their homes nationwide, as MRI fully integrates Hispanic-Americans into The Survey of the American Consumer.

MRI conducts 26,000 in-home interviews with U.S. adults each year about their media consumption habits and usage of products and services. Until now, the majority of interviews with Hispanic/Latino Americans were conducted in English. Spanish-language interviews were conducted in an ad-hoc manner—if, for example, a relative or neighbor was available to translate.

Now, MRI is systematically interviewing the full spectrum of Hispanic/Latino Americans. Several changes to The Survey of the American Consumer have been put in place to support this:

All interview support material has been translated into Spanish. This includes the letter of introduction, personal interview guide and self-administered questionnaire.

MRI is recruiting a bi-lingual traveling task force to address the issue of interviewing respondents in Spanish-isolated households. In an overwhelming majority of cases, if the Hispanic consumer MRI wishes to interview does not speak English, a bi-lingual interviewer will be dispatched to conduct the interview in Spanish.

Questions relating to language capability and country of origin have been added to the personal interview.
In addition, questions that measure viewing of more than 135 Spanish-language television programs—including novelas, specials and sport programs—have been added to MRI’s self-administered, in-home questionnaire. Once the ongoing fieldwork is complete, MRI’s clients will be able to seamlessly compare and contrast media/product usage, attitudes and demographics of Hispanics and general market consumers using a single source of research.

“Most marketers are aware that Hispanics are a fast-growing segment of the U.S. population. But a one-size-fits-all approach to communicating with these consumers just doesn’t work,” said Julian Baim, Chief Research Officer at MRI. “There are various levels of acculturation and differing brand/media preferences among the many segments of the Latino market.”

When completed, MRI’s Hispanic initiative will enable the company’s clients to parse media/product usage, attitudes and demographics of Hispanic consumers by language capability:

Spanish Preferred/Dominant
English Preferred/Dominant
Bi-lingual.

This will allow for a seamless comparison of Hispanic and general market consumers’ magazine, TV, radio and Internet usage, product usage for 6,000 product and service brands across 550 categories, demographics and attitudes. The data will be representative of the entire U.S. Hispanic population.