{"id":925,"date":"2010-01-07T18:37:31","date_gmt":"2010-01-07T18:37:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/https:\/\/morris.cymru\/?p=925"},"modified":"2023-07-09T21:48:11","modified_gmt":"2023-07-09T20:48:11","slug":"can-we-trust-barbs-viewing-figures-for-sgorio-on-s4c","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/morris.cymru\/en\/2010\/01\/can-we-trust-barbs-viewing-figures-for-sgorio-on-s4c\/","title":{"rendered":"Can we trust BARB’s viewing figures for Sgorio on S4C?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Yesterday The Telegraph<\/a> printed a story about S4C viewing figures for the football programme Sgorio<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Sgorio – Welsh for score – turned into a no score draw on the night despite regularly pulling in tens of thousands of viewers on other nights.<\/p>\n

It is a regular show on Channel Four in Wales featuring top matches from the German, Spanish and Italian leagues.<\/p>\n

Under the TV rating system, any programme with fewer than 2,500 viewers is regarded as “making no impact”.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Today the Western Mail<\/a> ran a very similar story. Before we get into a discussion about what this might mean, let’s examine the figures. According to The Telegraph<\/a>:<\/p>\n

The figures were compiled by the Broadcasters Audience Research Board.<\/p>\n

The body surveys viewing habits of 11,300 viewers in 5,100 British homes, and weights them according to the rest of the population.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

How many homes own television sets in the UK? Let’s use BARB’s own figures<\/a>:<\/p>\n

In 2009, 25.9 million homes own at least one television set out of a total of 26.6 million homes in the UK.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Let’s concentrate on television-owning homes. According to this 97% of homes in the UK own a television.<\/p>\n

The 5,100 British homes is 0.02% of the homes that own a television. BARB is collecting these figures by sampling one house in every 5000 television-owning houses in the UK, roughly speaking.<\/strong><\/p>\n

That may be adequate for popular programmes but is it enough to gauge the popularity of a minority language programme?<\/p>\n

S4C publishes a top 20 chart<\/a>. It would be good to have figures for other special interest programmes for comparison, but BARB doesn’t publish these figures free of charge. (Subscribe<\/a> if you want.) Regardless, how meaningful are these figures in light of the sample size? I’m not aware that BARB has more fine-grained techniques for sampling S4C viewing, anyone know?<\/p>\n

How many people live in Wales and in the UK? Let’s take the population figures from the Office for National Statistics<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Wales: 2.9 million
\nUnited Kingdon: 59.8 million<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Let’s now look at sampled viewers. BARB’s sampled viewers make up a proportion of the total number of viewers in the UK. Let’s assume BARB has picked a fair distribution of sampled viewers in Wales. We could then expect the proportion of sampled viewers in Wales to match the proportion of the UK who live in Wales.<\/p>\n

As a proportion, Wales makes up 4.8% of the UK population. Therefore we would expect BARB to have sampled approximately 548 viewers in Wales<\/strong> (which is 4.8% of 11,300).<\/p>\n

I’m going to make an assumption here. I’m going to assume that out of the 2.9 million people in Wales, 97% have access to a television in their own home. This reflects the 97% of households who own a television in the UK. Therefore we calculate that around 2.8 million people in Wales have a television in their own home. My aim is to get an approximate impression of the scale here – the order of magnitude – to decide how trustworthy the statistics are. The figures may be slightly off, so please let me know if you have more accurate figures.<\/p>\n

Therefore, each sampled viewer in Wales represents roughly 5000 of the television-watching population in Wales.<\/strong> This is similar to the figure for households above. I’m also assuming S4C’s heartland is Wales, although it is sometimes available in households outside Wales.<\/p>\n

BARB’s threshold is 2,500 viewers for a programme “making an impact”. These are not real viewers, but figures extrapolated from the comparatively tiny sample size.<\/p>\n

So according to this analysis, the conclusion that Sgorio made “no impact” rests on just ONE of the sampled viewers in Wales.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Again, is this enough to measure the reach of a programme, in particular one in a minority language?<\/p>\n

UPDATE 21\/10\/2010: Comments are off but trackbacks and pingbacks are on.<\/em><\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Yesterday The Telegraph printed a story about S4C viewing figures for the football programme Sgorio: Sgorio – Welsh[…]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"activitypub_content_warning":"","activitypub_content_visibility":"","activitypub_max_image_attachments":3,"activitypub_interaction_policy_quote":"anyone","activitypub_status":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[13,303],"tags":[406,407],"class_list":["post-925","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cymru","category-teledu","tag-s4c","tag-sgorio"],"yoast_head":"\nCan we trust BARB's viewing figures for Sgorio on S4C? - Carl Morris<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/morris.cymru\/en\/2010\/01\/can-we-trust-barbs-viewing-figures-for-sgorio-on-s4c\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Can we trust BARB's viewing figures for Sgorio on S4C? 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