Speaking of the MSM using lobby group research…
Sky News is at it… A survey commissioned by private health insurance company finds that the great British public believe no one political party can properly manage the NHS… The poll was done online with a respectable sample of 2,000 respondents, but the OnePoll market research company who provide “assistance with drafting questions – to gain news angles and get the results you’re looking for”… And it was published nearly a month ago…
Tags: Media
Ben Goldacre did a number on OnePoll at the weekend suggesting their surveys were a crock of shit
http://www.badscience.net/2009/08/pr-reviewed-data/
In a fairly astonishing post OnePoll have responded by saying that their surveys are…err pretty much a crock of shit
http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=136729275856&ref=mf
Hang about.
According to Glenn Beck and Daniel Hannan, we do not have any private health insurance in the uk, the state does everything….. or were they lying?
Mick
As you know, most surveys quoted/discussed in the MSM are shite. Without getting technical…
1 any robust survey should be up front about how its survey frame was selected. if it is not randomly drawn from the ‘representative’ population, furgedditabutit.
2. the phraseology of the questions asked is crucial. Are they leading?, do they steer towards a pre-determined outcome? ….etc. etc.
Any undergrad student could design and conduct a survey to demonstrate in a statistically significance sense that slugger is either amongst the most (a) middle of the road sites (b) most recondite of sites…. or (c) in norn ironland it must by definition be both.
in any case, most surveys deal in opinions, yeah?
Opinion is really the lowest form of human knowledge. It requires no accountability, no responsibility, no understanding. The highest form of knowledge is empathy, for it requires us to suspend our egos and live in another’s world.
how bout we save that discussion for another time?