Monday, January 16, 2006

Survey Results

As many of you know, a pet hobby on this blog is to poke holes in erroneous statistics. I was asked recently about why I am so distrustful of Korean surveys and statistics. One reason is because the methodology of the surveys are usually flawed. Take this one:

The Corea Image Communication Institute specializes in conducting surveys on foreigners with questions about Korea. But this time the institute gave a similar questionnaire to more than 1,400 Koreans, to see what Koreans think of other countries...The Koreans who took the e-mail survey were also asked what images pop up when they think of foreign countries.

The problem I have with this survey is the fact it was conducted by e-mail. Despite Korea's vaunted internet penetration rate, this is still flawed methodology to me since there are a number of factors that influence the randomness of this survey. Foremost is the fact that respondents self-select themselves. Think about it, if you got a survey from a random company, would you fill it out unless your really care about the matter?

posted by Dram Man @ 8:58 PM

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