Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: MONDAY, March 4, 1991                   TAG: 9103050028
SECTION: EXTRA                    PAGE: E-2   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE: NEW YORK                                LENGTH: Medium

TV POLL LETS CABLE VIEWERS SEE HOW THEIR OPINIONS COMPARE

Hosts David Birney and Eleanor Mondale interact like chatty local news anchors, smoothing over the half hour's somewhat abrupt shifts from weighty to fluffy topics.

The premiere careens from what Americans would like to do to rapists to the question of what parts of their own bodies they most would like to change. Within the first two weeks, the 6:30 p.m. cable program will touch on sexual satisfaction, pregnancy, depression and vigilantism.

Since Lifetime's target audience is women, the producers ask each other, "What questions on that topic would a woman want to know?" said Donna Harris, the network's vice president of original programming.

Backing Birney and Mondale are a respected polling company and free-lance news camera crews around the country, who provide the video sound bites from experts and ordinary people that give the show a lively pace and visual appeal.

For the Lifetime show, the experts at Princeton Survey Research Associates, led by two people who ran the Gallup Organization in the 1980s, use random digit dialing to reach 600 adults.

Of course, those 600 people cannot perfectly mirror all Americans, including the 7 percent of households that don't have phones. But answers of those who reflect undersampled people get extra weight in calculating the percentages read on the air, Princeton pollster Diane Colasanto said.

When the show says 70 percent believe repeat rape offenders deserve to be surgically disabled, the figure should be within 4 percentage points either way of the results that would have been obtained from all Americans. - Associated Press