Another smoking survey
A survey of 111 residents at Hamilton Lake and Innes Common playgrounds, the city bus station and Waikato University in mid-2011 found 94 per cent wanted children’s playgrounds to be smokefree.
This is much more sensible than the website poll on Auckland’s initiative that was magically translated into “a majority of New Zealanders”.
The poll will be a biased sample of the population, because it will over-represent people who go to children’s playgrounds, but it’s perfectly reasonable for them to have more say about smoking there. I assume (I have to assume, because the facts aren’t given) that the survey also asked if the bus station and the University campus should be smoke-free, and that the results were less favorable.
We also aren’t told who did the survey, and what the questions were. You might get quite different responses for a survey conducted by the Council and one conducted by the Cancer Society.
Even accounting for this, it looks as though there’s a lot of support, and I’d say the poll qualifies as not completely useless.
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 »