This paper describes a multi-method approach for measuring total television viewing of the 2000 NCAA men's basketball tournament by 18-24 year olds. The approach exploits three information sources - the Nielsen Media Research (NMR) national people meter (NPM), Harris Poll telephone research, and panel-based online research - to estimate out-of-home viewership of those included within the NPM sampling frame, and total viewership of those excluded from the frame. In short, information derived from the NPM is fused with individual-level survey data to generate estimates of total viewership for the entire population of 18-24 year olds. The evidence generated through this approach suggests that the NPM seriously under-estimated total viewership of the major games of the event by 18-24 year olds.
This paper considers the implications of new analytic advances on Internet-based surveys of non-random samples. The empirical evidence presented indicate that Internet-based forecasts in the 2000 U.S. elections were two times more accurate than telephone forecasts in common races, and that propensity score adjustment, a technique designed to minimize biases associated with non-random samples, was a main reason for the difference. As the credibility of any predictive research approach may hinge on its ability to pass this acid test, the evidence is important, with implications on research methods other than Internet-based surveys. For instance, the technique of propensity score adjustment could also be exploited by research organizations with panels measuring Internet activity, off-line purchase behavior, and TV viewing behavior. Such organizations could depend on propensity score adjustment to link attitudinal, opinion and other information to behavioral information collected through these panels without compromising data quality or substantially increasing the cost of data collection.