Syria poll and Europe’s work hours
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This is more or less the statistical icing on the cake of life. We make an edition of the programme for BBC Radio 4, but this is a download of a special edition broadcast on the World Service. Hello and welcome to More or Less on the BBC World Service. We're your weekly guide to the numbers in the news and in life. And I'm Tim Harford. This week, which European nation's workers work the longest hours? The Germans or the Greeks? But first, Syria, where for months now there's been bloody violence. Many have suggested the Syrian people are being oppressed by a cruel regime, but others have argued there's significant support for the government there. Here's a headline from an article published in the UK's Guardian newspaper.
Most Syrians back President Assad, but you'd never know from Western media. The article went on to say that a survey had shown that 55% of Syrians do not want President Assad to resign. This statistic has been reported widely by state-owned Iranian Press TV, The New York Times and others. So where did this 55% figure come from? It came from an internet survey of the Arab world by YouGov Siraj, the Dubai-based arm of the British polling firm YouGov. The survey covered 18 countries in the Middle East and North Africa and had just over 1,000 respondents. The central question was, in your opinion, should Syria's President Assad resign? But the number of people who took part in the survey in Syria itself isn't said.
However, we worked it out. Looking closely at the survey report, you find that of the 1,012 people who responded, 211 were polled in the Levant region and 46% of them were in Syria. But more or less, we can do the maths. And we calculated the number of people in Syria who were surveyed was 97 or 98. Now that's surprised us and polling experts too. Johnny Heald, managing director of the survey company ORB, has been carrying out polls in the Middle East for many years. He told us you need to be really careful about pulling out figures for a particular country from a larger survey.
We would very, very rarely do anything less than 1,000 interviews. 1,000 is the generally accepted industry minimum to be able to speak confidently about what people from a particular country think about an issue. If you say that this poll covers people from 18 countries, then that's fine, but you need to be very careful when you interpret the findings And it's not good to say that 55% of Syrians, for example, think that Assad should stay when only 97 people were asked that question.
We contacted the people who did the survey at YouGov Siraj and they told us they had not claimed the poll was representative of all Syrians. They say they had talked about respondents from Syria, not all Syrians. Unfortunately, it seems this subtlety was lost on the people who commissioned the poll and trumpeted its findings, the Doha Debates TV programme, sponsored by the Qatar Foundation. By the time the survey results get to its website, they read... In a statement, the pollsters at YouGov say, with hindsight, they wish they'd been clearer.
To the layman, there seems very little difference between the two expressions, but for researchers, the difference is huge. I think we should have stressed the difference much more to our client, or simply not shown the Syria data, as there was always a chance it might be misinterpreted.
When we asked the people at the Doha debates about this statistic, they insisted the result was of interest. You're listening to More or Less with me, Tim Harford. If there's a statistic you'd like us to investigate, email moreorless at bbc.co.uk. Greece is facing more spending cuts as a condition of accepting a bailout deal of 130 billion euros to help it avoid bankruptcy. It's an issue which has risked splitting Europe, with resentment in some nations that they, hard-working, sensible people, should have to bail out their lazy, feckless neighbours who've been living it up for the past decade with no thought for the consequences.
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