Nationals Senator John Williams has been making much recently of his survey that purports that 75 per cent of Armidale residents don’t want a carbon price.
It is concerning that, on such an important issue as climate change, Senator Williams is presenting unvalidated and amateur data as fact.
I spoke to Senator Williams’ office and they confirmed that his survey had been posted to every household in the New England and Lyne electorates. I for one did not receive such a survey. I would be interested to hear how many other people also did not receive it.
Further to this, Senator Williams’ results are inaccurate because they suffer from one of the most basic errors of statistical sampling; a self-selection bias. This occurs “whenever the group of people being studied has any form of control over whether to participate” (www.wikipedia.org). For example, people who have strong opinions may be more willing to spend time answering a survey than those who do not.
To participate in Senator Williams’ survey, you had to fill it in and then post it back to his office. This is a classic example of self-selection.
The result of a self-selection bias is, unsurprisingly, a non-representative sample and thus inaccurate results. Unfortunately it is not possible to determine how inaccurate they are because there is no unbiased control group to compare it to. It may be that 78 per cent of Armidalians want a carbon price, 12 per cent do not and 10 per cent want a pony for Christmas. With such lazy sampling, you wouldn’t know.
If Senator Williams was genuinely interested in discovering the opinions of Armidale’s residents he would have employed an independent data collection company. As it is, his survey, the collation of its results and the subsequent report, is being managed by one of his staff in Inverell. I didn’t ask if she had a degree in statistical analysis.
Although, to give Senator Williams the benefit of the doubt, I can’t imagine why a National Party member would be interested in promoting skewed data on the carbon price.
Hadley White,
Armidale
