Press Releases 2007
 

THURSDAY 3RD MAY 2007

BCI ANNOUNCES JOINT RESEARCH PROJECT WITH NDA

The Broadcasting Commission of Ireland (BCI) has today (Thursday May 3rd) announced details of a collaborative research project with the National Disability Authority (NDA) focussing on the representation of people with disabilities in Irish broadcast media.  The project involves the commissioning of three independent pieces of work addressing: a policy, legislative and practice review of other jurisdictions; an attitudinal survey and; a content analysis of current programming.  All three research project projects will run concurrently.  The ultimate aim of the collaborative work is to inform the development of guidelines for broadcasters on the representation of people with disabilities in Irish broadcast media.

Speaking about the announcement Conor Maguire, Chairperson of the BCI said “We are delighted to be involved with the NDA in this joint research project which is the first collaboration on research for the BCI. Developing research on the representation of people with disabilities in Irish broadcast media is important at this time.  The attitudinal survey conducted during the development of the BCI Code of Programme Standards found that negative representations of people with disabilities created significant offence to survey respondents.  We look forward to the furtherance of research in this area and the production of appropriate guidelines for broadcasters.”

The three discrete strands of research envisaged in this project will provide an integrated overview of the representation of people with disabilities.  The content analysis component will analyse a total of 415 hours or programming on national radio and television, regional, local and community radio against a series of questions.  The review of other jurisdictions will investigate existing standards of practice, legislation, codes of practice/guidelines in addition to any voluntary codes which may be in existence.  Finally the attitudinal survey will provide evidence on attitudes to the representation of people with disabilities in both radio and television broadcasting among people living in the Republic of Ireland, with specific analysis across a range of variables.

Details of the collaborative research project, including invitations for interested parties to apply to undertake the research are available on the BCI and NDA web-sites; www.bci.ie; http://www.nda.ie.  For those interested in applying to undertake any of the strands of research, the closing date for receipt of applications is 12 noon, May 28th.

Bring me to application information

For further information , please contact, Caroline Smyth at csmyth@bci.ie

01 6441255 or 087 131 7285.

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