Surveys again
Last Wednesday I wrote that a survey should always provoke the questions “How was it done? By whom? and What are they selling?”
This week, Stuff and TVNZ tell us that half of New Zealanders don’t have a will, and that there are more wills in the South Island than the North Island. This survey was commissioned by Public Trust (who do wills), but there’s no information about how the survey was done or by whom. Public Trust don’t currently have any information on their ‘News‘ webpage.
An interesting coincidence, but probably no more: at the moment, the proportion saying they have a will on the clicky poll on the Stuff website is 47%.
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 »