Piece of Mind

The problem is, it is not the statistics themselves, it is how those who have them choose to interprete them.

If Saga had said 'We did a straw poll of 78 of our customers who bought insurance' and this showed....... we would know exactly where the figures came from and could make our own judgements about their reliability but they don't they say our survey shows that the majority of older people.........

It is like the survey one of the wedding magazines does each year that states that the 'average' wedding costs over £100,000 or something silly like that. In fact the sample is a self-selected group of brides proud of just how expensive their wedding is going to be. All those having less expensive weddings who ignore the survey and those that start their economies by not buying wedding magazines are not represented.

I'm sure there is a science behind data sampling Monica but as an ex Marketer myself I veer towards the lies , lies and damn statistics scale

Saga offers tend to be more expensive than any others.

Do you have SNP mice Jane? If not, they might refuse it.

Och well I'll just shred it for bedding for the mice. At least that'll be some use for it.

I don't actually think that works any more!

For a start, the post office would have to agree to send all unsolicited mail back to where it came from (unlikely), and secondly the sender would have to agree to accept it and pay the postage (again, highly unlikely...)

Thanks for the tip paddyann. I'll do just that with the SNP litter we get containing total inaccuracies and wishful thinking.

do what I do with tory propganda that comes through my door mark it return to sender and stick in in the postbox or give it to your postman ...DONT put a stamp on it.They'll be charged at least twice the postage and if enough people do it ,it will stop them sending us unsolicited mail with stats that are frankly rubbish

NanaandGrampy, as an wx- Market Research Manager, it is remarkable just how accurate very small samples can be. The art is in the selection methods used, size of the sample population and the reliability you are looking for, measured in standard deviations. I have, somewhere, a little dial that I could enter population size into and it would give me the minimum sample size required for a given measure of accuracy. the figures were often surprisingly small

Having said that, the kind of surveys Saga, or any manufacturer draws up and then publishes, is usually run by the PR department who know absolutely nothing about the proper statistical background of surveys and the audience is generally self-selected to readers of their magazine/services and cannot possibly be proved to be typical of all older people and should be treated with the contempt they deserve.

I wouldn't buy anything from Saga after a friend of mine had terrible experience when trying to claim on her Saga car insurance.

Saga are a company like any other. They are out to make money.
N&G you are right they should publish the details of how they did their sampling. I am no statistician but I can see how useless some of these surveys are.

I suspect they are basing that statement on a ridiculously small sample group that they surveyed.

I always cringe when something comes up on TV and says 98% of people thought xxx...and in tiny letters at the bottom it says sample size 78 people !!

Ridiculous.

I'm not a fan of Saga anyway because I think their insurances and holidays are over-priced.

I suppose they could argue that they merely commissioned a poll, which is different from actively supporting a party but, given the number of polls there are already, I wonder why they felt it necessary to go to the trouble and expense of commissioning yet another one. As research strongly suggests that polls do not just reflect opinion but influence it also, I can understand why some people question whether this move was "apolitical".

I don't know why but I always thought Saga would be pro-Tory.

I don't buy anything from Saga, but this looks like another case of all people in a certain demographic being lumped together.
e.g. "most older people support Teresa may" "Most older people voted brexit" "most older people are not tech savvy.
his sort of thing widens the gulf between generations.

But yes, an organisation like Saga should be apolitical, a bias is not a good business policy for a start.