September 10, 2012

Real vs bogus

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The Herald’s clicky poll accompanying the story on Kiwi self-satisfaction is a nice illustration of the unreliability of bogus polls (they’re only using it for entertainment, so that’s ok).

If the clicky poll was a real random sample, its margin of error would be about 1%. It isn’t, and it’s not.

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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 »