How accurate are Nielsen ratings?
Overall, they do quite well, and believe me, I know where all the bodies are buried. It is, in fact, one of the most carefully constructed and executed measurement systems or measurement reporting tools in the entire world, in academia, in commerce. That’s partially because the real emphasis is on making sure the sample is representative, because all research fails with a bad sample. So the most important thing is to make sure that the sample truly represents the American population. They spend a great deal of effort doing that. There are Nielsen employees who literally walk down the street with a clipboard and a map updating city records to make sure that every housing unit has been accounted for so they don’t miss people. They recreate the work that the zoning commission is supposed to do, just to make sure that they have the best possible sample to draw from so that everybody has got an equal chance. Then once they pick somebody at random, they try very hard to get those people to c
