Provenance-free survey data

Stuff reports that 97 per cent of those aged 18-29 are saving for something.  This is attributed to RaboBank

The myth of feckless youth which does not understand the value of money should be laid to rest, new research from online deposit bank RaboDirect suggests.

and you now know everything they’re prepared to admit about how the survey was done.

There isn’t a press release up at RaboBank yet, but the previous press release (from May) is about another survey. It also says nothing about methodology.  There is a link to a PDF, which might have had more details, but it has been taken down.

With more searching I found a RaboBank press release from 2010 that did still have it’s ‘full survey results’ PDF link up — it has lots of colorful bar charts, and while it still doesn’t say anything about how the data were collected, the footnotes to the graphs include sample sizes and a little magenta logo that suggests the data were collected by market research firm TNS and were probably some sort of online panel.  So that Rabobank survey wasn’t totally bogus — there’s disagreement about the accuracy of this approach, but at least it is trying to get the right answer.

So, it could be that the youth saving survey is also plausible. Or not. Hard to tell, really. And that’s before you dig into what “saving for something” might mean — is it actual money-in-the-bank or a New Year’s resolution.