Chances Are: Reality TV Voting

“Are we ashamed to add cash to Simon Cowell’s wallet?”

In this round of Chances Are we examine voting on reality television shows. Specifically, deploying a special survey technique to avoid the effects of any social stigma (see here for more details), we find that 12.9% of the UK population have voted on a reality TV show in the last 12 months. Twitter users were found to be three times more likely to have voted.

The most common TV show to be voted on is X Factor, with 29% of the votes going to Simon Cowell’s competition. The next most common is Strictly Come Dancing with 23% of the votes.

The research also revealed that respondents are slightly embarrassed to disclose that they have voted on these TV shows. When asked directly whether they had voted in the past year, 9.4% admitted doing so compared to the true underlying rate of 12.9%. By using these two measurement techniques in parallel we can continue to measure the embarrassment in the UK population around different topics of interest, and compare which types of issues show the most and least embarrassment.