Bogus poll lockdown headlines
The Herald had a story and headline based on a bogus online clicky poll today: Covid 19 coronavirus Delta outbreak: Majority vote for South Island alert level change
As we’ve seen in the past, bogus online polls can be very misleading. That last link, for example, compares three bogus polls from the same time period on the same question, whose results differed by more than you’d expect for random samples of only ten people.
The Herald does try to wiggle a bit on interpretation; the story starts “The votes are in and it is clear whether or not Herald readers think the South Island should stay in lockdown after Friday”. But the 70,000-odd votes are a tiny proportion of what the Herald claims as its readership: in January, they reported 610,000 daily print subscribers, 1.9 million monthly unique viewers on the blog, and a weekly ‘brand audience’ of over two million. There’s no reason to expect the poll responses are representative of any of those Herald readerships, either.
Usually one could argue that the bogus polls don’t do any major harm; they just amount to pissing in the swimming pool of public discourse. Usually they don’t get headlines. Usually they aren’t about a sensitive policy question in the middle of a pandemic. If the accuracy of the numbers matters, you don’t want a bogus poll; if the accuracy doesn’t matter they shouldn’t be the basis for a lockdown-related headline
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 »
The Herald ‘paying subscribers’ is far smaller than 610,000. That would be more than double that of even its print heydays. The ABC audit numbers previously are below 100k, no figures for current year.
Its 610,000 ‘readers’ of its print editions, which is a modelled number based on 5-6 persons having a read of the same paper, often in the household or office or cafe etc.
The digital subs are perhaps 60,000 plus ( last year)
3 years ago
Quite possibly true, but not really relevant since the story I’m writing about said “Herald readers”.
3 years ago