The Exploration of Demographic Factors on The Survival State of Chinese Movie Theaters in LA

Faculty Sponsor: Lisa Dombrowski

Live Poster Session: Zoom Link

Zara Zhou

Zara Zhou is a rising senior (’23) from Ningbo, China. She is currently double majoring in Film Studies and Economics, minoring in data analysis. Zara was a marketing intern in Xiaohongshu, an Instagram-like platform in China. On campus, Zara was a cello player of the Wesleyan orchestra and chamber music ensemble and an orientation leader. She loves visual art and science and is eager to discover how they intersect. She is the course assistant for the course Microeconomics and Hollywood and Big data.

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Abstract: The project focused on finding out the reasons that contributed to the appearance and decline of Chinatown movie theaters and their financial health from 1940 to 2000 in Los Angeles. Using demographic census data and other datasets, we want to identify factors that could be linked to this phenomenon, including the density of Asian immigrants and the industry distribution in both theaters’ primary addresses and their adjacent neighborhoods. I used an interactive ArcGIS online to map theaters in LA and found two main clusters that differentiate from other counties’ or states’ Chinese Language Movie Theaters’ distribution. This raises another exploration in testing the effect of location and clustering on the theaters’ survival state. Using ordinal regression and multilevel logistic regression in R, we found that marriage rate, business industry, Chinese population, and other factors could contribute to the operating condition of theaters. Nevertheless, the location is not a significant factor impacting theaters’ performances. This research could be applied to exploring Chinatown Movie Theaters in North America and contribute to the navigation of their general history and development.

GIS Map: https://wesleyan.maps.arcgis.com/apps/mapviewer/index.html?webmap=ccbd555d478442738dd7f1becac366c1

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