How 136 People Became 7 Million Illegal File-Sharers

Barence writes "The British government's official figures on the level of illegal file sharing in the UK come from questionable research commissioned by the music industry. The Radio 4 show named More or Less examined the government's claim that 7m people in Britain are engaged in illegal file sharing. The 7m figure actually came from a report written about music industry losses for Forrester subsidiary Jupiter Research. The report was privately commissioned by none other than the UK's music trade body, the BPI. The 7m figure had been rounded up from an actual figure of 6.7m, gleaned from a 2008 survey of 1,176 net-connected households, 11.6% of which admitted to having used file-sharing software — in other words, only 136 people. That 11.6% was adjusted upwards to 16.3% 'to reflect the assumption that fewer people admit to file sharing than actually do it.' The 6.7m figure was then calculated based on an estimated number of internet users that disagreed with the government's own estimate. The wholly unsubstantiated 7m figure was then released as an official statistic."

Comments

Story meaning?

[sopssa]

I actually had several feelings about this summery, because:

1) Usually pro-filesharers try to make it sound like filesharing is usual activity and try go for most or 70-90% user share
2) The summary tries to paint this study bad because it "downsides" the amount of filesharers
3) The rant about examining only 1,176 people for the study - in which case the same kind of tv viewer statistics and other studies are made in what case.

So could someone please explain *why* is it a questionable research. It is like every other study where you study small amount of people and make estimates based on it to reflect whole population. Usually this amount of people also gives somewhat correct results on the whole population. Theres some error margin, but its close enough.

So what is the point of this story? That statistics researches use only minor subset or people to do their research instead of asking from everyone? They always have.