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Many Surveys, About One In Five, May Contain Fraudulent Data (sciencemag.org)
sciencehabit writes: How often do people conducting surveys simply fabricate some or all of the data? Several high-profile cases of fraud over the past few years have shone a spotlight on that question, but the full scope of the problem has remained unknown. [Tuesday], at a meeting in Washington, D.C., a pair of well-known researchers presented a statistical test for detecting fabricated data in survey answers. When they applied it to more than 1000 public data sets from international surveys, a worrying picture emerged: About one in five of the surveys failed, indicating a high likelihood of fabricated data.
When I take most surveys I answer calculated to confound the test as much as possible, on the assumption that anyone could be doing so; and thus, to accelerate the process is to bring it to the attention of the researchers faster. The problem is that it's an inherently flawed method.
23.7 % of statistical analyses make up their statistics.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
It's not that only 1 in 5 surveys may contain fraudulent data, it is that the fraud is only incompetent enough to be caught by this method in 1 in 5 surveys.
Like it or not, a lot of public opinion polls are paid for by people who want to support a specific point.
Public opinion polls these days are as much PR and marketing as anything else.
Honestly, Pew makes money doing this stuff; honest player or not, they have a vested interest in keeping up the belief that their stuff is honest, unbiased, and accurate.
But I'm entirely willing to believe opinion polls are carefully crafted, or sneakily tweaked, to arrive at the conclusions they've been commissioned to a arrive at.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
If you ask: "Do you believe that mothers should be able to legally murder their babies within 2 months of the creation of life?" you get a very different answer than if you ask "Do you believe that women should have the legal right to abortion when the fetus can be demonstrated to show no brain activity more significant than that of a snail."
This might be intentional, or simple unconscious bias.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
The rest are merely intentionally misleading. You can get just about any answer you want, without making up data, by carefully selecting your questions and your survey population.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
Roughly half the marketing departments at companies I've worked for have used half-baked surveys to gather statistics so the company name and the statistic get repeated in the industry over and over again.
This often happens like this: "At (industry conference) this year, let's pass out a survey asking whether or not someone has every heard of a coworker getting hacked by (whatever threat our product purports to mitigate). Survey goes out to already half-paranoid people walking by, and the entire marketing and sales department fills one out that says 'yes I have'. A week later a press release goes out that says "(company) surveyed (# of people) IT managers and other attendees at (conference) and found that (high percentage) had direct knowledge of a coworker getting hacked by (threat)." Very often this stuff gets picked up by the press, bloggers and even other competitors, and the essentially made-up stat gets repeated and repeated until some people even think its true.
Examples:
- http://www.tripwire.com/compan...
- http://www.prnewswire.com/news...
- https://www.voltage.com/breach...
Hey, we thought that 1 in 5 sounded like a nice believable number. How dare you question it. We looked at at least three surveys to come up with this.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.