Having your say
There’s a 1News headline Only 1 in 4 Aucklanders back Wayne Brown’s sweeping cuts
I was expecting this to be based on proportions supporting the cuts in public submissions, but I was glad to see that the Council commissioned a proper survey in addition to accepting general comments and 1News reported it correctly. That’s an excellent combination: open public comment allows people to point out problems or solutions you haven’t considered and a survey allows quantitative measurement for issues where you know the options in advance. More organisations should do this.
As you’d expect, trying to get quantitative results from the public comment doesn’t work very well. For example, 1News reported that 40% of submitters didn’t want any cuts, as opposed to the estimate of 7% for all Auckland in the survey. People who have something to say are more likely to say it.
The number of submissions was very large: more than 10% of the number of votes in the mayoral election. Even so, the submissions are very unrepresentative. That’s not a problem if you aren’t trying to get quantitative results; having the input biased towards experts and people who care a lot can be helpful. It would be a problem if you were just counting the results.
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 »
Maybe you have had an influence!
2 years ago
once again a majority wanted to go to heaven but didnt want to die first
‘Fifty-two per cent of submitters wanted to either increase rates or have the council take on more debt than the council had already proposed.
But rates higher than 4.66% were only supported by 4% in the survey as 30% instead wanted to borrow more in order to keep rates lower.’ One news
2 years ago
“More organisations should do this” – Can’t help wondering if the reason they don’t is a combo of not wanting to shell out for such a comprehensive undertaking and not recognizing the power of such a comprehensive undertaking. Obviously it’d cost more to do both, but wouldn’t it be more than worth it to have significantly more useful info?
2 years ago