Ask a silly question...
Damn Tim Blair for beating me to this one, but I'll post it anyway. The loopy poll that supposedly proves Australia is a racist country, or that people think it is, has been getting the MSM very excited. Unfortunately, journalists seem to completely shut down in the face of anything that requires any kind of quantitative analytical thinking, so they seem to be genuinely unaware of the absurdities they've been peddling.
Not so our beloved Prime Minister John Howard, who pointed out yesterday that the selfsame poll cannot meaningfully return two mutually inconsistent results. The 'racism' poll returned a result of 75 percent yes to the question 'Do you think there is underlying racism in Australia', and an 81 percent yes to the question 'Do you support multiculturalism'. Now, as the PM points out, if this poll represents the Australian people accurately, the large support for multiculturalism must mean that we are not a nation of racists.
The problem is, of course, with the first question. Firstly, it's phrased in such a way as to contain the assumption that the respondent will not self-identify as a racist. If it means anything, it's asking: "Of course you're not a racist, but do you think most other Australians are?" A rubbish question.
Secondly, there's that weasel word 'underlying'. Now, what exactly does this mean? If it means anything, it means 'invisible'. It is, if I can coin a phrase, a dog-whistle question, which is asking the respondent to identify racism of which they personally have seen no evidence. Translated, the question is saying: "Now, we all know there's racism out there, and are you going to seriously stand there and tell me you're too stupid to know that, even if you haven't seen any evidence of it?"
It's a basic fact of polling psychology that people will answer some questions differently in the context of an opinion poll, than they would if asked the same questions in another, more familiar, context. One of the motives is a wish not to appear stupid, so people will claim to know things they really don't, or to be aware of things they actually have no firsthand experience of.
Damn Tim Blair for beating me to this one, but I'll post it anyway. The loopy poll that supposedly proves Australia is a racist country, or that people think it is, has been getting the MSM very excited. Unfortunately, journalists seem to completely shut down in the face of anything that requires any kind of quantitative analytical thinking, so they seem to be genuinely unaware of the absurdities they've been peddling.
Not so our beloved Prime Minister John Howard, who pointed out yesterday that the selfsame poll cannot meaningfully return two mutually inconsistent results. The 'racism' poll returned a result of 75 percent yes to the question 'Do you think there is underlying racism in Australia', and an 81 percent yes to the question 'Do you support multiculturalism'. Now, as the PM points out, if this poll represents the Australian people accurately, the large support for multiculturalism must mean that we are not a nation of racists.
The problem is, of course, with the first question. Firstly, it's phrased in such a way as to contain the assumption that the respondent will not self-identify as a racist. If it means anything, it's asking: "Of course you're not a racist, but do you think most other Australians are?" A rubbish question.
Secondly, there's that weasel word 'underlying'. Now, what exactly does this mean? If it means anything, it means 'invisible'. It is, if I can coin a phrase, a dog-whistle question, which is asking the respondent to identify racism of which they personally have seen no evidence. Translated, the question is saying: "Now, we all know there's racism out there, and are you going to seriously stand there and tell me you're too stupid to know that, even if you haven't seen any evidence of it?"
It's a basic fact of polling psychology that people will answer some questions differently in the context of an opinion poll, than they would if asked the same questions in another, more familiar, context. One of the motives is a wish not to appear stupid, so people will claim to know things they really don't, or to be aware of things they actually have no firsthand experience of.
posted by cuckoo at
8:36 AM
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