Abstract
When I was first asked to write an editorial about the Thompson and Yokota paper on movie ratings,[1] I did what any self-respecting survey researcher who studies consumers would do. I read the paper carefully, looked at the Web sites, searched for other articles and papers, and assessed the available polling data. I thought this paper represented serious and important work in gathering data from multiple sources, trying to make sense of information that consumers have available, and helping to understand the variations. Industry ratings, they find, are a blunt instrument, an imperfect guide with only 4 or 5 points on the rating scale. How can such a simple scale capture the complexity of the fabric of all violence, sex, and language in films? It makes some sense to me to dig behind those numbers and compare the data from other independent sources (if such entities can truly exist).