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  The Society for Consumer Advocates and Mavens

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TV AND RADIO AUDIENCE RATINGS

All statistical ratings compiled to measure audience levels of radio and TV programs may too often be based on too small of a sample of people taken from the whole universe of available users to be able to get TRULY statistically valid and reliable results! For example, a sample of just 300 people may be used to represent millions of viewers or listeners. Our tastes in entertainment programming are so fickle, how could a small sample of people be representative of millions of fickle entertainment program viewers and listeners?

It is easier to get a "bad" sample than it is to get a "good" one. Radio and TV advertising sales managers, whose programs are currently "down" in the ratings, are forever complaining to the ratings services about the demographically lopsided samples taken and used to detemine the size and demographic make-up of the audience tuning in to media programming.

Audience ratings services never mention the sometime pathetic response rate to audience surveys or possible biases of the quantitative and qualitative instruments used to measure audience size and demographic make-up. You rarely hear about ratings service discrepancies, inaccuracies and the under-sampling of certain demographic groups of people when it comes to accurately measuring the "targeted" sample of people. In their zealous quest to end up with so-called valid and reliable results, audience ratings services may possibly overlook discrepancies and inconsistencies in their own data gathering procedures!

The end result is billions of advertising dollars may be spent each year on nothing more than potentiallly unreliable, invalid audience research and surveys. Remember, in scientific inquiry, unlike the "experiment", the "survey" happens to be the least reliable tool of scientific inquiry and research. The rule in survey research is, if you observe it you may disturb it, meaning any results coming out of survey research may be pretentious and contrived therefore questionable as to its validity and reliablility because in surveys the sample sizes are typically too small with too many uncontrollable variables, as well as built-in research biases and weaknesses, to ever get conclusive, realistic statistics!

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