SHORTWAVE LISTENING IN AN ITALIAN COMMUNITY.

In Boston, Massachusetts, a polling study of a group of typical marginal Americans furnishes a clue to the motivation and behavior of the average shortwave listener. This project is one of a series of shortwave listening studies carried out by the Princeton Listening Center during the spring and summer of 1941. The chief function of this preliminary polling study was to ascertain how much and what kind of radio listening went on in the North End, both shortwave and standard-wave and to determine superficially what sort of person listened to what sorts of programs. The relative proportion of sexes in the shortwave audience tells nothing very significant. Nor does listening to shortwave seem to any great extent to be a function of age. Of first importance among the correlates of shortwave listening is a complex of factors described by the term militant Italianism. The militant Italian in the North End is the one who objects most strongly and vocally to job discrimination against his nationality group.