The goal of the Digital News Report is to describe and analyze how information is consumed in a variety of countries. The research was conducted by YouGov via an online questionnaire in late January/early February 2024.
Samples were selected using nationally representative quotas by age, gender and region in each market. Quotas were also applied from Education in all countries. In addition, we applied political quotas based on vote choice in the most recent national election. The data in all markets were weighted from agreement to data accepted by census/industry.
In Spain the survey was based on 2,060 panel surveys of people over the age of 18, representative of a total population of 47 million people. The Internet penetration rate at the time of survey was 93% of the total population.
More generally, online samples tend to underrepresent the news consumption habits of people who are older and with lower income levels, meaning that online use may be slightly overrepresented and traditional offline use underrepresented. However, Internet penetration in Spain is over 93% and, therefore, the differences between the online population and the national population will be small.
The use of a non-probability sampling approach means that it is not possible to calculate a conventional 'margin of error' for individual data points. However, differences of +/- 2 percentage points (pp) or less are very unlikely to be statistically significant and should be interpreted with a high Degree of caution.
Surveys reflect people's stated behavior, which does not always reflect people's actual behavior due to biases and imperfect recall. They are useful for finding out people's opinions, but these are subjective and the aggregates reflect public opinion rather than objective reality. Even with relatively large sample sizes, it is not possible to meaningfully analyze many minority groups. Some of our survey-based results will not match the industry's data , which often rely on different methodologies, such as web tracking.
From 2012 to 2020, respondents who reported not having consumed any news in the last month were excluded. From 2021 onwards, this group, which generally presents a lower interest in news, was included. In previous years, this group represented on average around 2-3% of the initial sample in Spain, which means that the decision to include it has not significantly affected the comparative results.
A more complete description of the methodology, panel partners, and a discussion of non-probability sampling techniques can be found on our website along with the full questionnaire at reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk.
