The object of our study was to find what genres of movies, books, and television shows, both males and females prefer to watch. The first into google was “movie genre statistics rating.” We looked at a few sites and on the fourth one down we found one that seemed usable. The first study that we found that was related to ours was done on the genre and film popularity of movies (http://www.calstatela.edu/faculty/sfischo/media3.html). In this study, the number of genres was 14, and n = 5930. Our study only has 7 genres, so the percentages of some of the genres in this website’s study may be slightly lower than the percentages we find preferred. In this study, the most preferred genre was “Drama” at 30.7% of people preferred. “Action” (16.2%) and “Romance” (12.4%) followed up in 2^nd and 3^rd. Last was “Sports” (1%). Further down on the page they stratified the sample by gender. To our surprise “Drama” was preferred by 32% of males and just 23% of females. “Romance” was strongly preferred by females (31%), and not so much for males (4%). Out of this study, males mostly preferred “Action,” “Drama,” and “Sci-fi,” and females preferred “Romance,” “Drama,” and “Action.”

 

The second source was found by typing “movie ranks genres stats” into google, and clicking the third link down on the second page (.http://www.statcrunch.com/5.0/viewreport.php?reportid=10229). This website used a pie graph to compare the ranks/popularity of movie genres in 2008. Though this source did not stratify by gender, it still gives good insight to the most popular movie genres. “Drama” was the most popular genre (53.48%). “Comedy” (16.11%) and “Documentary” (15.33%) were the next highest in the rankings. This is the second source that had “Drama” as the most popular genre, and we don’t offer it as a choice in our survey, so this could be a potential weakness in our study. The category could be covered in the “Other” option of our survey, but it’s less likely for people to choose “Other” than “Drama” if drama really is their favorite movie genre. We do have “Comedy” as an option, and our option of “Non-Fiction” will cover the category of “Documentary.” The study from this website had 10 genres, including the categories “Concert/Performance” and “Musical,” which really aren’t types of movies in our opinion. “Sports” was not included. From this source we found that the most popular genre doesn’t necessarily produce the most movies or make the most money. The study in this website also indicated that “Action” actually produced the most money. “Action,” along with, “Adventure,” “Comedy,” and “Horror,” all had more income than “Drama,” probably because there were less drama movies produced. The website used box plots for each genre to show the gross income.

 

For our last source, we tried to find information about the popularity of different book genres. It was difficult to find what we were looking for, but after a lot of searching, we finally found a source with decent information for our study (http://www.parapublishing.com/sites/para/resources/statistics.cfm). To find this site, we googled “most popular book genres statistics” and clicked the first link given. A 2001 study showed that 55% of people bought fiction books, while just 10% bought a nonfiction book. 9% of people have bought a book about Cooking/Crafts, but our survey doesn’t include instructional books, although “Other” could cover any other category. As of 2006, Novels/Comic Books made $330 million. It was also found that 64.6 million Americans read at least one romance novel a year, and that 78% of romance readers are female, which is what we expected. The study also found that religious books were very high in sales, but this information isn’t useful for our study, which is basically based on genres of entertainment.