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Always take survey results with a grain of salt
Wednesday - October 26, 2005 01:12 PM in
Any survey needs to be treated with a healthy dose of skepticism, and anything under 1% is unreliable no matter what the claimed margin of error. That's just a fact. I sometimes attribute otherwise-inexplicable results around 1% to the "confusion factor." As in: no matter what you do, 1% of people will be confused.
Nothing could illustrate this better than the results of the 2001 U.K. census. That's the official government-sponsored tally of (nearly) every living soul in the U.K.
According to the government's own statistics, the best possible data about the population of those fair isles, the religion of 390,127 citizens (0.7% of the population) is "Jedi."
No, I am not making this up. The link goes to the official census statistics, and this fact was reported (though not widely) in the media at the time.
Jedi, as in Yoda, Luke Skywalker, and "Use the Force."
The U.K. National Statistics office attributes this to an "internet campaign" which encouraged people to write in Jedi as their religion in the hopes it would achieve official recognition. And in typical English fashion, they note that "...the Jedi campaign may have worked in favour of the Census exercise. Census agencies worldwide report difficulties encouraging those in their late teens and twenties to complete their forms. We suspect that the Jedi response was most common in precisely this age group. The campaign may well have encouraged people to complete their forms and help us get the best possible overall response."
As long as by "best" you don't mean "most accurate."
Posted by Peter Leppik
According to the government's own statistics, the best possible data about the population of those fair isles, the religion of 390,127 citizens (0.7% of the population) is "Jedi."
No, I am not making this up. The link goes to the official census statistics, and this fact was reported (though not widely) in the media at the time.
Jedi, as in Yoda, Luke Skywalker, and "Use the Force."
The U.K. National Statistics office attributes this to an "internet campaign" which encouraged people to write in Jedi as their religion in the hopes it would achieve official recognition. And in typical English fashion, they note that "...the Jedi campaign may have worked in favour of the Census exercise. Census agencies worldwide report difficulties encouraging those in their late teens and twenties to complete their forms. We suspect that the Jedi response was most common in precisely this age group. The campaign may well have encouraged people to complete their forms and help us get the best possible overall response."
As long as by "best" you don't mean "most accurate."
Posted by Peter Leppik
Posted at 01:12 PM by | | | |