Lotto demographics
The headlines at both the Herald and Stuff say they’re about Lotto winners, but the vastly more numerous losers have to have basically the same demographics. That means any statistics drawn from a group of 12 winners are going to be very unreliable.
There some more reliable sources. There’s (limited) information released by NZ Lotteries under the Official Information Act. There’s also more detailed survey data from the 2012 Health and Lifestyles Survey (PDF)
Of the 12 people in today’s stories, 11 were men, even though men and women play Lotto at about the same rate. There’s a lot less variation by household income than I would have guessed. There is some variation by ethnicity, with Asians being less likely to play Lotto. People under 25 are a bit less likely to play. It’s all pretty boring.
I’ve complained a few times that clicky bogus polls have an error rate as bad as a random sample of about ten people, and are useless. Here we have a random sample of about ten people, and it’s pretty useless.
Except as advertising.
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 »