Advances in non-representative sampling
My attention has been drawn (by Joseph Simpson, on Twitter) to the Campbell Live online poll on the GCBSB vote. These polls are fairly bogus anyway, being collected from self-selected viewers or readers, but in this case there’s an added twist.
In red at the top “Please fill in all fields or your vote will not be counted.” The fields include name, email, and address. Wouldn’t you expect that people unhappy with the prospect of increased (legal) surveillance of New Zealanders might be less willing to give all their personal details with their vote?
To be fair, the form says that the personal information is private and won’t be linked to you personally. If we assume don’t mean this, but actually mean that the personal information won’t be linked to the votes, and that TV3 is able to ensure this, there’s no problem.
Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Auckland. His research interests include semiparametric models, survey sampling, statistical computing, foundations of statistics, and whatever methodological problems his medical collaborators come up with. He also blogs at Biased and Inefficient See all posts by Thomas Lumley »