Are Kiwis more cautious online?
The Herald has a headline “Young Kiwis among most savvy web users”, which would be justified if the phrase ‘most savvy’ was omitted.
The story comes from AVG, who sell internet security software, and so want you to be nervous online. They have been conducting a set of surveys starting with kids and are now on to 18-25 year olds. All we’re told about the survey methodology (by AVG, not by the Herald) is that the surveys were conducted by Research Now, so it’s not completely bogus but might be more or less representative or, um, ‘targeted’.
However, we do get told that there were only 4400 respondents in 11 countries. Even with a completely random sample of 400 in each country, that gives a margin of error for comparing two countries of about 7 percentage points. You can see a set of infographics from the survey here, and it’s pretty clear that a lot of the differences are compatible with random sampling error.
There certainly isn’t a general tendency for Kiwis to be more ‘web savvy’: while NZ has one of the lowest rates of admitting to accessing banned sites while at work, we have one of the highest rates of allowing colleagues to see everything that friends can see on Facebook. The proportion for other questions, such as ‘friend’ing your boss, was intermediate.
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 »