Babynames: Popularity of ‘Friends’ Character Names

Hypothesis

How, if at all, has the debut of “Friends” impacted baby names across the United States, specifically in the years it was actively streamed?

First, I installed the necessary packages.

library(babynames)
library(tidyverse) 

── Attaching core tidyverse packages ──────────────────────── tidyverse 2.0.0 ──
✔ dplyr     1.1.4     ✔ readr     2.1.5
✔ forcats   1.0.0     ✔ stringr   1.5.1
✔ ggplot2   3.4.4     ✔ tibble    3.2.1
✔ lubridate 1.9.3     ✔ tidyr     1.3.1
✔ purrr     1.0.2     
── Conflicts ────────────────────────────────────────── tidyverse_conflicts() ──
✖ dplyr::filter() masks stats::filter()
✖ dplyr::lag()    masks stats::lag()
ℹ Use the conflicted package (<http://conflicted.r-lib.org/>) to force all conflicts to become errors

Observation 1:

To being, I created a graph that includes the three main FEMALE characters from the show, ‘Phoebe’, ‘Rachel’, and ‘Monica’. To do so, I filtered the data set to only include these three names. This graph includes the popularity of names since 1880. This range of data allows the audience to gain a better understanding of the commonality of these three names.

Female Graph

babynames |> 
  filter(name %in% c('Phoebe', 'Rachel', 'Monica')) |> 
  filter(sex == "F") |> 
  ggplot(aes(year, prop, color = name)) + geom_line() +ggtitle("Female 'Friends' Names Since 1880")  +
  labs(y= "Popularity in Percentage", x = "Year") 

When analyzing the three female names since 1880, it is obvious that ‘Rachel’ is by far the most popular name. Both ‘Monica’ and ‘Rachel’ reached it’s peak in the late 1900’s, before the show had even aired.

This next graph will encompass the three main MALE characters from the show, ‘Joey’, ‘Chandler’, and ‘Ross’. This graph encompassed the same process as the previous graph.

Male Graph

babynames |> 
  filter(name %in% c('Joey', 'Chandler', 'Ross')) |> 
  filter(sex == "M") |> 
  ggplot(aes(year, prop, color = name)) + geom_line() +ggtitle("Male 'Friends' Names Since 1880") +
  labs(y= "Popularity in Percentage", x = "Year") 

Different than the female graph, all three male names experienced peaks, with ‘Chandler’ being the most dramatic. ‘Ross’ has been a popular name since the 1800’s, whereas ‘Chandler’ and ‘Joey’ did not appear until the early 20th century. All three names seem to have decreased in popularity by the end of the 1900’s.

Observation 2:

For my next graphs, I decided to filter the years from the data set. I chose the years 1994 to 2004, which was the time when the show was activily streaming. To make it easier to visualize and conceptualize, I created a ggplot, all while adding a color to each name. Additionally, I added titles to understand the difference between these graphs and the ones previous.

Female Graph

babynames |> 
  filter(name %in% c('Phoebe', 'Rachel', 'Monica')) |> 
  filter(year > 1994 & year < 2004 & sex == "F") |> 
  ggplot(aes(year, prop, color = name)) + geom_line() +ggtitle("Female 'Friends' Names Between 1994 and 2004")  +
  labs(y= "Popularity in Percentage", x = "Year")  

This graph shows that ‘Rachel’ and ‘Monica’ experienced a decrease in popularity since the shows debut in 1994. ‘Rachel’ experienced a 50% downfall, and around the same# percentage for ‘Monica’. However, ‘Phoebe’, who was by far the least popular name out of the three, gained some traction around the year 1998.

Male Graph

babynames |> 
  filter(name %in% c('Joey', 'Chandler', 'Ross')) |> 
  filter(year > 1994 & year < 2004 & sex == "M") |> 
  ggplot(aes(year, prop, color = name)) + geom_line() +ggtitle("Male 'Friends' Names Between 1994 and 2004") +
  labs(y= "Popularity in Percentage", x = "Year") 

This graph shows that every male name, other than ‘Chandler’, experienced decreases in popularity since the debut of ‘Friends’.’Ross’ experienced a dramatic decrease and ‘Joey’ stayed constant for being the least common name.

Observation 3:

For the next, and final, series of graphs, I wanted to take a closer look at the most popular name from each gender: ‘Rachel’ and ‘Chandler’. For both genders, I filtered the data to only include these specific names beginning in 1994, all the way to the end of the data set (2017). This was so I could get a better understanding if it was due to ‘Friends’ that the name lessened in popularity, or simply due to a change of times. To do so, I filtered the data to only include these names and the specific date range.

Female Graph

babynames %>% 
  filter(name %in% "Rachel") %>% 
  filter(sex %in% "F") %>% 
  filter(year > '1994') %>% 
  ggplot(aes(year, prop)) + geom_line() +ggtitle("Popularity of 'Rachel' since 1994") +
  labs(y= "Popularity in Percentage", x = "Year") 

The name ‘Rachel’ decreased almost instantaneously with the debut of ‘Friends’. It’s popularity peaked during the year of ‘Friends’ release (1994) and immediately decreased shortly after.

Male Graph

babynames |>  
  filter(name %in% "Chandler") |>  
  filter(sex %in% "M") |>  
  filter(year > '1994') |> 
  ggplot(aes(year, prop)) + geom_line() +ggtitle("Popularity of 'Chandler' since 1994") +
  labs(y= "Popularity in Percentage", x = "Year") 

‘Chandler’ was the only name, out of six, that gained traction since the release of ‘Friends’. However, there was a steep decrease after in 1997 and after 2000. At it’s peak, 0.1% of babies in 1998, in the United States, were named ‘Chandler’.

Conclusion:

In conclusion, the debut of the show ‘Friends’ did not cause there to be an increase in any particular name. However, there was a decrease in five out of the six names. ‘Chandler’ was the only name that gained some traction after the debut of the show. Overall, the popularity of ‘Friends’ did not correlate in baby name trends in the years following 1994.