HappySqurriel said:
Did I say they were using unprofessional methods? Even if you use the most professional methods the results can still be meaningless. Call up 100 people and ask "Do you have a couple of minutes to be part of our survey on High Definition electronics?" and see how many people are willing to be part of the study; in most cases you would find somewhere between 5% and 20% will be willing to take a survey and no matter how random you sellect the initial 100 people, the people who take part in your survey will not be a random sample. Talk to any professional statistician and they will agree with me. On top of that, does 60% of people responding yes to "Did the existance of 2 High definition movie formats prevent you from choosing to buy a HD-Movie Player?" really imply that everyone who took part in the study was well informed? On top of that, if 25% of the people who answered no to that question thought DVD was a HD-Movie format it would have a huge impact on the results of the study. |
Actually they keep a cross section of the populace to interview, about 500,000 people total. Who i believe they pay. So it's a selected sample. Which is actually... very unprofessional.
The problem is that the firm that did this survey doesn't specialize in this kind of survey... and only did it to drum up more buisness.
Their actual buisness is to get people to hire them to market media and other things to people. So they'll publish something like this and make it cheery so people send buisness there way by choosing through the cross section those that will help their case.
