April 23, 2018

Bogus poll headlines

From StuffOne in six Kiwi drivers use their phone at traffic lights, poll finds

This is a bogus poll from Neighbourly, the local bulletin board/discussion site owned by Stuff‘s publisher.  It’s based on “more than 3900” self-selected members of the site, without any attempt to make the figures representative. And that’s before you get to the issue of how honest people are being about their law breaking.

There’s almost no limit to how wrong bogus polls can be. Thanks to anchoring bias, there’s a good chance you’re better informed if you don’t see the results than if you do.

For a while, the NZ media had stopped writing stories and headlines based on bogus polls, but it’s been starting up again.

 

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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 »

Comments

  • avatar
    Jimmy Oh

    Perhaps we should conduct a bogus poll of our own, one that will provide overwhelming “evidence” that people are less likely to re-visit websites that rely on bogus polls.

    7 years ago