How unrepresentative bogus polls can be
From @davejac on Twitter, clipped from Stuff
Since this is on the Census, we have good population data. If you include family-trust properties as ‘own’, which seems to be the intent, just over a quarter own mortgage-free, just under a third own but are paying a mortgage, and about a third are paying rent. The rest are more complicated.
The poll under-represents renters and over-represents owners, and it quite dramatically under-represents “Other”.
[update: those figures are for households, but the broad pattern of differences would be similar for people — there are more single-person households renting, but also large ones]
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 »