About Me

Find out more about me here.

06 August 2012

Nielsen Ratings

Back online after a week of packing, moving, unpacking, and hosting visitors. Regular posting to resume today.
--

Just a quick methodological note. Our household took part in a Nielsen survey recently. I was super geeked about this, but it has certainly lost its excitement as we went along. I had thought previously that Nielsen installed some kind of electronic monitor that directly identified when and what people were watching. They may indeed do that--I don't know--but in our case, we manually had to log time, duration, station, channel, and programming essentially whenever a TV was on for an entire week. Eventually, as fatigue set in, this began to affect our viewing habits. Before turning on the TV, we began to ask ourselves whether we really wanted to watch TV enough to outweigh the cost of having to record a bunch of information. This kind of measurement effect probably means that the mean hours of television viewing are underestimated.

No comments:

Post a Comment