WHAT DETERMINES RECREATIONAL TELEVISION BEHAVIOUR OF PEOPLE? A STUDY WITH REFERENCE TO THE GAMPAHA DISTRICT

Although the television industry carries great importance in micro andmacroeconomic aspects and supports a great demand as a recreational orleisure source among people, it seems that the television industry is laggingbehind its actual capacity and is widely contributing to the domestic GDP.Less effective management and poor identification of choices of people hasdriven the industry toward poor conditions. Therefore, this studycontributes to identify the factors that support the television programpreferences of people, selection of public or private channels and timespent in front of the television. These identifications would indeed help thetelevision industry to achieve maximum capacity while competingeffectively in an oligopolistic market and achieving higher contribution tothe national GDP.In order to obtain the statistical analysis, primary data has been gatheredfrom four Grama Niladari Divisions of the Gampaha Divisional Secretariatin the Western Province, Sri Lanka. Simple random sampling procedurehas been carried out in the sample selection process and data has beengathered from 609 individuals in 168 households; from February 2015 toApril 2015, to identify determinants of programme preferences andpublic/private channel choices, the binary logistic regression model hasbeen applied. The semi log regression model is used to identify thedeterminants of television watching hours of the people.Results in the binary logistic model of programme preferences emphasizethat old, male, married and employed individuals are showing more interestin news and knowledge related programmes while creating positivesignificant relationships with the news and knowledge based programmedemand. When a person is being employed, public channels were mostlypreferred creating significant positive relationship while when a person ishaving specific political norm, they prefer mostly private channels andcreate significant negative relationship in the model. Regarding the hoursallocated for watching television by the people, age, marital status andemployment status shows positive relationships within the model.Considering the employed segment; when a person has more than 8 hoursof working time, it shows a significant negative relationship with televisionwatching hours. In descriptive statistics, it shows that old and middle agedpeople are more interested in watching news and politics related programmes while females mostly prefer programmes containing softcontent such as tele-dramas and religion based programmes. Considering news preference in separate, Hiru TV was leading among other channels. “Atapattama” on ITN was the most preferred knowledge based programme followed by “Doramadalawa” on ITN. “Satana” programme on Sirasa TV was the mainly preferred political programme among individuals. On the other hand, when it came to tele-dramas, the largely favoured Indian mega dramas were “Me Adarayai” and “Sapna”, telecast by Sirasa TV. “Hiru CountDown” was leading among the respondents when it came to their most preferred musical programmes. Keywords: Demand for Watching Television, Hours Spent Watching Television, Programme Specific Demand, Public/Private Channel Choice