National Survey Shows Most Latino Listeners Are Bilingual

When Southland radio station executives began complaining several years ago about major fluctuations in their ratings, they suspected it was because Arbitron, the company that provides the surveys, had a flawed system for measuring Latino “listenership.”

Those surveyed were asked whether they spoke primarily English or Spanish, but there was no standard against which to measure the results. Did the percentage of Spanish-only speakers accurately reflect the local Latino population as a whole? Nobody knew.

The stakes were high, especially since Spanish-language stations have topped the ratings for the last five years: Too heavy a percentage of Spanish-only listeners in one ratings period might unfairly boost the audience projections of Spanish-language stations at the expense of English-language outlets. If the percentage was too light, the opposite problem would exist. (Stations rely on the ratings in setting their advertising rates.)

Absent any other local data with which to work, Arbitron developed a more detailed methodology for determining Latino language preferences in its quarterly listenership surveys. After three years of study and tests, the first official results were released this week, covering last summer. They show that the majority of Latinos surveyed in 28 U.S. markets with large Latino populations reported being bilingual or primarily English-speaking.

In the local market, which includes Los Angeles and Orange counties, Arbitron said that 27% of the Latino respondents were English-dominant, 37% were bilingual and 37% were Spanish-dominant.

The determination was made by asking respondents three questions: what language they used most at home, what language they used most away from home and what was their overall language preference. If all three answers were the same, the person was classified as dominant in that language; if they were different, they were classified as bilingual.

Arbitron cautioned that its figures were only a reflection of the people it surveyed and do not necessarily reflect language preferences of the total population in any of the given markets, although a company spokesman said Friday that Arbitron believes the numbers are a “good indication” of the general picture.

Arbitron plans to continue asking the language preference questions in future ratings surveys. The information is meant to help station managers understand their listeners and also will be used to compare one quarterly report to another to see how the figures fluctuate.