High Resolution
			Background: Basic definitions
			Background: Intermediate level
			Background: Full Treatment
			Format Flavors
			Operative Affinity

Operative Affinity

The audiences for urban country and NPR news share similar sex, age, and race appeals. Affinity seems high based on these three facets alone.

But examine another facet – education – and the affinity plummets. In this case the education lens reveals the largest difference in appeal; education is the affinity that is most operative.

Operative affinity is the lowest affinity score among all of those calculated. It is our best guess at the true affinity.

Think of it this way: the more lenses we have to look through, the better able we are to see meaningful differences between audiences.

Unfortunately, lenses are not free. AUDIENCE 98^® is able to add education and VALS^TM2 to our arsenal of lenses, but one time only. Are they worth it? Should we buy them again in the future?

Let’s take each in turn and see how it adds to our ability to improve upon our affinity scores.

Education and VALS

The age, sex, and race of listeners come bundled in Arbitron’s basic package of listening data. Recently Arbitron began measuring the educational attainment of listeners. And it’s something we should pursue, because education determines the operative affinity among major programs more than half of the time.

Gathering VALS information on each listener is an expensive process, requiring a special survey that asks each listener several dozen questions.

VALS does improve the accuracy of our affinity estimates – but not nearly as often or as much as education.

How We Know This

We know this because we examined the numbers for all major national program combinations tracked by AUDIENCE 98.

We use as baseline affinities those based on age, sex, and race alone. When we add the education lens, we get better affinity estimates 62 percent of the time – very significant improvement.

When the VALS lens is added on top of this, the affinity estimates improve 21 percent of the time. However, most improvements are small, with only five percent changing the category of affinity at all – typically from "very high" to "high".

These nuances revealed by the VALS lens may be useful, but are they worth it?

Refining Appeal & Affinity Tools

We ask in order to determine how precise our tools need to be in the future, and how much they need to cost.

It is clearly worth pursuing the education data now gathered by Arbitron for ongoing assessments of appeal and affinity.

VALS is another matter. Although it has many potentially powerful applications in public radio, refining affinity estimates does not seem to be one of them. Given its expense, we can continue to compare the appeals of public radio programs quite well without it.

– David Giovannoni
AUDIENCE 98 Core Team

 

Audience Research Analysis
Copyright © ARA and CPB.  All rights reserved.
Revised: September 01, 2000 12:38 PM.