Created and funded by the television industry, SMART (Systems for Measuring And Reporting Television) has developed a variety of new a approaches to providing reliable audience data in the face of dramatic changes in television transmission technology and home usage. This paper describes SMARTâS achievements in core research, panel cooperation and maintenance, encoding/decoding programs tuned, quality control, and reporting software.
A report on certain methodological research in the U.S.A. is provided. Results from three telephone coincidental studies that were completed in 1986 through 1991 are compared to audience estimates from people-meter measures. Analyses directed at understanding persistent differences by sex/age group are discussed.