We’re a Nielsen family!

If you’ve never watched television or you’ve lived under the proverbial rock for sixty years, you might have no idea what a Nielsen family is. Nielsen is a company that samples television viewing households to determine what television shows Americans are watching. Nielsen describes a Nielsen family as panelists that enrich their “… view of the marketplace and ensures that our research accurately reflects consumers' shopping and media habits.”

According to Nielsen Ratings TV History, the ratings service originated in 1930 to measure radio program audiences. In 1950, it evolved to measure television audiences.

Usually ratings are collected via metered sets in selected households. The target family receives a device that connects to the television set that transmits actual channel selections to the Nielsen headquarters on a daily basis.

A second collection method is the TV Viewing Diary. We received the TV Viewing Diary. It asks a variety of questions including race, gender and age of the household viewers, number of TVs in the home and method of broadcast signal (cable, dish or over-the-air).

The diary requests that we capture our viewings for seven, twenty four hour days. Nielsen wants to know who’s watching which program on what station. Also, if the TV is on and no one is watching, they’d like us to record this as well.

There’s a section at the back of the diary to list program information for shows that are recorded for viewing at a later time. If we watch a recorded show, we list it in the viewing log and annotate it as a recorded program. (We’re even listing shows we watch on Netflix and Hulu.)

We’re completing the diary for our most used television in the house. Nielsen asks that we keep a separate log of programs viewed on the other TVs (I created a spreadsheet to collect this data).

On the surface it’s seems like a lot of work, but it’s not.

When we received the diary, I thought of an episode of Night Court (I am unable to find the episode number) where a guy was on the witness stand and revealed that his family was a Nielsen family. He was upset because he and his family went out for the evening and didn’t watch a particular program. He believed his night out was the reason Punky Brewster was cancelled.

I’m not that obsessive, though I’ve been accused of taking the survey too seriously. It’s just that I subscribe to the theory that garbage in equals garbage out, so I’m trying to make the diary as accurate as possible. Besides, maybe my participation could get the Kardashians cancelled. (I can dream, can’t I?)

Has anyone else been involved in a Nielsen survey? Let me know how it went for you.