Economist survey - An important caveat

We'll revisit the the Economist survey over the weekend: this time it's the turn of the "religion" questions. However in the mean time...

PJ, guru in all matters statistical, adds an important caveat:

"The errors on that survey must be pretty large - and splitting by political affiliation will end up nigh on meaningless. Not to mention the myriad other limitations of survey data. But at least they do the very minimum necessary to take a survey seriously - i.e. provide full questions and answers, and details of the sample. Didn't see a response rate though - but that is widely seen as the Achilles heel of survey data (making, for instance, the published confidence intervals meaningless)."

[Incidentally, if you haven't read PJ's brilliant series of blogs about the controversial Kirsch et al. meta-analysis on antidepressants, why on earth are you wasting time reading my blog? - go on, it's much more interesting, and much more important, than anything you'll find here.]

The Economist Retracts

A correction in The Economist:

In our article on Anglo-Saxon attitudes (”Anglo-Saxon attitudes”, March 29th) we said that Americans and Britons felt much the same about the death penalty: they were broadly against it. They do feel strikingly similarly, but not as we said. Between a quarter and a fifth are opposed, the same proportion are in favour, and around half would support the death penalty in some circumstances. Apologies. The online version of the article has been corrected.

Thanks to Jim Manzi, who spotted it too, for passing this on.

Economist Survey - The Death Penalty UPDATED

This week I'll be blogging about The Economist's "Anglo-Saxon" attitudes survey. You can find the survey itself here. I was particularly struck by the throw-away comment:

[Americans and Britons] feel much the same about the death penalty: they are broadly against it. - [Source]

I thought this was surprising, as the survey appears to show nothing of the sort. From the survey itself (Question 4, page 9 of the pdf file):
Do you favour the death penalty for murder? (Yes, always; Yes, sometimes, depending on the circumstances; No, the death penalty is wrong; Don't know)

	Britain	USA
Yes, always	21	26
Yes, sometimes	53	50
No	24	20
Don't knows	2	5*

Now, it's clear that the respondents do feel broadly the same way about the death penalty: but they are in favour of it. 74% (UK) and 76% (US) favour it in some circumstances. Now, the survey only had just over 1000 respondents, and although there was a breakdown by political affiliation, income, and age, there was no breakdown by location etc, so one can argue about the significance and relevance of the survey: what one cannot argue is that this survey offers any evidence that American or Britons "are broadly against" the death penalty.


* NB: yes, the American data does add up to 101%: suspect either a rounding error or typo.

UPDATE: The Economist retracts; see next post.