Who Are the Nielsen Media Research Families?
The Nielsen Media Research families are a cross-section of the households with television sets all across the United States. Because we have selected them in a way which gives every household an equal chance of being picked, we have all kinds of households in the sample. This means that we have homes from all fifty states, from cities and towns, suburbs and rural areas. We have people who own their homes and people who live in apartments. Some homes in the panel have children and some don t. We have African-Americans, Hispanic-Americans, Asian-Americans and Native Americans; virtually every ethnic and income group is represented. When we check the characteristics of households in our samples against the U.S. Census data, we find that our samples look very much like the population. Of course, the match is not perfect. When you draw a representative sample, it is usually close to the population on a given characteristic. How many Nielsen Media Research families are there? There are 5,000
