December 12, 2011

Stat of the Week Winner: December 3-9 2011

Congratulations to David Welch for his nomination winning our Stat of the Week award!

He nominated a front page story on the NZ Herald:

Almost half of Kiwis working overseas make more than $100,000 a year – and they are split on whether they want to come home. A quarter say they have no wish to return to New Zealand to live, but 27 per cent are looking for work here.

David commented:

A classic case of a non-representative sample — the real statistic here is that half of 15000 Kea members who chose to respond to an online survey earn over 100k. Throughout the article, the proper “respondents” is replaced with “kiwis”. But then it wouldn’t be news-worthy…

While the headline and introductory comments use “Kiwis” (and the point about a non-representative sample is not addressed in the article) the rest of the article may now have been updated to indicate it was only for survey respondents. We note also that original press release from Kea is careful with its wording, using “respondents” and “overseas-based Kiwis in the survey”.