surveys

[fremsley]

Why is british culture and the media based around surveys which usually (in the small print) are based on 1000 people so prominent today.The news programmes and popular afternoon radio shows fill their shows with them. Is individuality dead.

[Oneeyedvic]

It has been proven that (if conducted corrreclty) asking a thousand people can be extrapolated across the country to an accuracy of a couple of percent.

From the Mori-ipsos website:

Q9 How can you be so sure your surveys are representative of the British public?
To ensure our data are representative, the people who take part are selected very carefully, according to the specific survey criteria. For example, when carrying out a national face-to-face opinion poll, we would randomly select a number of local areas (sampling points) and, within each area, interview a specified number of people (respondents). Respondents within each sampling point are selected either randomly (e.g. conducting an interview at every 'nth' address), or through setting targets (or quotas) on particular characteristics (e.g. age, gender, work status) deemed to be linked to how people might respond to the survey. The sampling points are selected so that, when combined, the total sample reflects the characteristics and opinions of the national population.

http://www.ipsos-mori.com/rmu/faq.shtml

[123everton]

It's alot of b0llocks if you ask me!

[tiggerblue10]

And don't forget Family Fortunes. Lol

Just as a matter of interest, when will the next census be? I would love know how many much the population has grown since the "invite all economic migrants to Britain" campaign started several years ago.

[123everton]

Tigger has a point according to the last census the fastest growing religion is Jedi (a rise of 100% since the last one).
Lies damn lies and statistics.

[WaldoMcFroog]

The next census is in 2011, Tigger.

123, you're not quite correct. Jedi was entered by 390,127 people (0.7% of the population), but just because people have entered it on a census does not confer legal recognition; it has merely been assigned a code as a common response. No where has the ONS suggested that Jedi is a religion.

Finally, the following will show how many people from a given population you need to survey to have confidence that a given answer is within +/- 5% of what 95% of the population would say.







http://www.statistics.gov.uk/census2001/pdfs/secti on5part3.pdf Page 15.