… Nielsen is now measuring what it calls the “unique audience” for Twitter posts about television, providing a more complete view of the phenomenon known as social TV. On Monday the company is introducing Nielsen Twitter TV Ratings, a product announced last year that professes to measure all the activity […] Read more »
Political polarization of the American public continues to rise. Or does it?
The fight over the government shutdown is the latest battle in an American political system that seems ever more polarized. Certainly the parties in Congress are moving ever further apart. And the newly released 2012 American National Election Study—arguably the canonical political survey of Americans—suggests that Democrats and Republicans in […] Read more »
The demise of polling has been greatly exaggerated
If the 2012 cycle revealed anything about the current state of polling, it’s that, overall, it is still incredibly accurate. … But while polling remains very accurate, because of the increasing difficulty of reaching and keeping people on the phone, getting it right is becoming harder and harder to do. […] Read more »
Nielsen to Add Mobile Device Viewing to TV Ratings in Fall 2014
TV programmers frustrated that shows watched on tablets and smartphones have been invisible to Nielsen’s ratings may finally get a solution — next year. … The approach, the culmination of more than three years of work, will for the first time provide a single, consistent measure of live programming viewing […] Read more »
PPP’s Results Don’t Excuse Its Bad Methodology
… Polls work for a reason. It’s not voodoo. Polling works because pollsters appreciate and employ sound statistical principles to produce a representative sample of a target population—like, say, American voters. So, no, the “goal” of a poll is not to “get it right,” or another variant of the point […] Read more »
Polling the right people matters
Polling methodology has been a hot topic of late. But in all the discussion about “random deletion,” weighting by vote, analytics and dozens of other important issues, a basic principle has been overlooked, a principle that could well be a key culprit in some recent massive failures — you’ve got […] Read more »