Big Brother Demographics By Season

CJ Andrews | ARTG 5530

Introduction

From a young age, I grew up watching Big Brother, a CBS reality tv competition in which a house of 12-17 players must strategize to be the last "houseguest" remaining. Each week, players compete for powers to control the nominations for eviction from the game. Then, one of the nominees is voted out.

The overall strategy involves:

1. Creating alliances to be in the house majority
2. Persuading/lying to other players to keep yourself safe
3. Winning competitions for safety or power
4. Generally being well liked by other players

Throughout its past seasons, it has been very clear that Big Brother advantages white, male players because of the lack of diversity in its casting. White players are the majority each season, with sparing Latinx, Black, and Asian representation. Year after year, majority alliances exclude minorities and women, resulting in an even more white, male dominated season after a few weeks of gameplay.

Analysis

Based on a dataset from Github user @vdixon3, the following stacked bar chart illustrates the severity of Big Brother's casting problem. To prepare the dataset, I limited the number of ethnicities that appear in the dataset to avoid overwhelming the user. I also removed data on seasons 1-2 because they featured a different game format.

To capture the CSV into stacked bar segments, I used Javascript to manipulate the instances of players into a 2D array, the outer list representing each season and the internal list representing the ethnicity breakdowns for each season. Using the filter function, I isolated the players into groups based on their ethnicity and season to push object entries into the internal list that include the group's size and highest placing player. As filters are manipulated, the 2D array is reformatted without the demographics of players that were filtered out by the user through the UI.

Visualization

Below, explore the demographics of Big Brother seasons 3-22. Filter by ethnicity or gender to better understand the casting breakdown. Toggle between placement rank percent to see how the demographics change over the course of each season as players are voted out.

The visualization proves that not only do white players make up the overwhelming majority of the overall cast, but they are also the most likely to survive until the end the game. See for yourself how severe Big Brother's minority disadvantage is...