Kalamazoo College students watch less television but more online than the average American.

A survey recently completed by Nicholas Wood and Liz Robison at Kalamazoo college found that the average Kalamazoo College student will watch more shows online than the typical American. A study conducted by Schonfeld earlier last year claimed that on average an American will watch only 27 minutes a week or just under half an hour. The findings of our study vastly differ from that of Schonfeld's as we found that Kalamazoo college students will watch an average of nearly 5 hours a week. There are many reasons why this might be the case. We at Kalamazoo college likely have more free time as well as better access to the internet and the benefit of being one of the main consumers that most online programming is intended for.

However, some of these theories contradict the findings that Kalamazoo college students watch less television than Americans. The same study say that Americans will watch over 30 hours of television a week while we only found that Kalamazoo college students watched only one and a half hours. Some of the reasons that explain these two gaps could be that since most college students have a limited income and therefore default to watching online illegally where they can watch for free and at their own confidence.

All that might be interesting to you but if you are like me you probably think along the lines of what rather than how much. Our survey also asked people questions about what they preferred to watch. The findings were that live action shows and movies were greatly preferred to cartoons and sports. As one might expect upon closer examination of people preference in sports there was a large gap in the opinions of men and woman. so surprisingly though is that there is also a difference preference of live action shows between genders with woman preferring it to men. This gap is almost as large as the one seen between men and sports. Unfortunately this study was not able to determine preferences between gender for the other two types of programming. This is not from lack of data as the survey was conducted on a large scale. To insure the best possible results we built a automated computer program to send out completely random emails. As a result of this we guaranteed a completely random sample without biased as well as had a large sample size of over 200 students.

Nick Wood