Polls and surveys are like crime stories – I usually scan them with one question in mind: “Anyone I know involved?” In the case of polls, I’m usually looking for a “Gotcha!” — an excuse to shout, “Ha! This poll’s gotta be wrong – that’s not me or my friends at all!”
The Center for Media Research has issued a brief with these and other findings from research firm Piper Jaffray:
- Hollister remains the No. 1 clothing brand among teens,
- Dunkin’ Donuts coffee, Premium, appeared in the top 10 teen choice brands for the first time this year,
- Pottery Barn teen shoppers prefer the Swedish IKEA brand of furnishings, and
- Fewer teens report downloading music illegally this year (61 percent) as opposed to last year (64 percent).
Any of these items – or the fact that Piper Jaffray also reports teen fashion spending down by as much as 20 percent (a “discretionary recession” is the term the report uses) – could be the jumping-off point for a series of trend articles about student preferences on your campus. Or write an article about the accuracy of polls and surveys – check Poynter’s NewsU for an online course called “Understanding and Interpreting Polls.” NewsU courses are interactive and take a couple of hours to complete, but you can stop and restart at any point.
