Pia audience survey chart

[mark schilling]

Pia is not "selling information" so much as providing a service to readers,
telling them how several dozen ordinary moviegoers felt about the film they
have just seen.

Here are the questions, as best as I can tell from the results:

1) Rate the film on a scale of 1 to 100.

2) What did you like about it? Story? Acting? Music? Directing? Visuals?

3) How old are you?

4) Who did you come with?

The collective answers are expressed in little charts.

They also print comments from several moviegoers, together with headshots.

Scientific? Probably not -- but again, the results are intended for, not
researchers, but readers looking to get a sense for whether a film is for
them or not. As a journalist (formerly with Screen International, now with
Variety), I sometimes find Pia rankings valuable for getting a "man (or
woman) on the street" take on a film I can't get from a flack or a critic.
The comments are especially revealing in their honesty, though raves are
more common than pans.

Mark Schilling


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Aaron Gerow" <gerowaaron at sbcglobal.net>
To: <KineJapan at lists.acs.ohio-state.edu>
Sent: Saturday, January 14, 2006 12:21 AM
Subject: Re: Pia audience survey chart


>
> On 2006.1.13, at 02:16  AM, mark schilling wrote:
>
> > While we're on the subject of Best Ten lists, Pia magazine has come
> > out with
> > their overall film popularity rankings for 2005, based on audience exit
> > surveys
>
> While I'm on the subject of problematic polls, I've always found the
> Pia survey to be rather suspect. Not only is there the problem of
> survey sample, but the questions are inexact and the survey in no way
> tries to accommodate for differences in audiences and survey
> conditions. It is a curiosity, which you could perhaps use in a
> footnote when writing about a film, but does little more than increases
> the amount of information Pia is trying to sell.
>
>
> Aaron Gerow
> KineJapan owner
>
> Assistant Professor
> Film Studies Program/East Asian Languages and Literatures
> Yale University
>
> For list commands, send "information kinejapan" to
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>