MPAA Piracy Survey - Junk Research

Cpt_Corelli writes "Alwayson network claims that a recent survey conducted by Online Testing Exchange (OTX) and distributed by the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) is crap. The MPAA's summary of the survey claims, among other hard-to-believe assertions, that 'about one in four Internet users have downloaded a movie.' (It turns out this isn't true, but this is the factoid that was heard around the world the following week.) When did you stop trusting sponsored 'research'?"

Comments

Because internet users NEVER lie.

[almostmanda]

In order to stay "qualified" for these surveys and, in the end, get paid, many users will answer "yes" to every question that may lead to more questions. Internet surveys CAN be useful for market research purposes, but only when the respondents are confident that their answers won't effect their compensation rate.
If a survey will pay you $10 if you're a beekeeper and answer beekeeping questions, many people will claim to be beekeepers. Who's stopping them?

i like the stat

[protocol420]

hey, if 1 in 4 people have illegally downloaded music, thats a nice voting demographic for some politician. i should run on a pro-p2p pro-tech platform. who's with me!

Re:"Stop" trusting?

[maxpublic]

Let's not forget:

c) what personal agenda they may or may not be pushing.

Here's an example of c) in action. Back in the '80's a group of scientists used a very in-depth, well-funded study to 'prove' that women in their 20's had healthier babies than women in their teens, and therefore teen pregnancy was a Bad Thing(TM). Not for any 'moral' reason, mind you, but because it was clear that becoming pregnant as a teenager put your child at unnecessary risk, when you could wait until your 20's and avoid that risk.

This research was so well-received by both the left and the right that it held for nearly two decades without being disputed. In fact, it wasn't disproven until last year.

You see, it turns out that the researchers in this case had a strong interest in proving that teen pregnancy was a bad thing, because they personally thought that teen girls having sex was morally reprehensible. In order to cook their results they decided not to control for one very important factor: pre-natal care. That's right, they deliberately did not control for pre-natal care. It's a well-known fact that women in their twenties are far more likely to plan their pregnancies than women in their teens, and so tend to have much better pre-natal care, so this action wasn't accidental but deliberate.

What happens when you control for pre-natal care? What happens is that you piss off a lot of morally conservative people, because controlling for pre-natal care shows that the healthiest babies in the world are born to women between the ages of *13 and 17*. Not exactly something you want to advertise if you're one of the folks screaming about the 'evils' of teen sex.

Needless to say the study was blasted. Not the science of it, which was solid, but on 'moral' grounds, with people claiming it should never have been done in the first place.

So you not only have to ask "who paid for the research" and "who do the researchers work for", but also "do they have a personal agenda they're trying to foist on others using pseudo-science"?

Max