| Just how gullible do you think I am? |
[Jan. 28th, 2005|01:47 pm] |
Interviewing the big cheese from a company selling a web conferencing product today:
Me: "I'm trying to find out how to make meetings more productive. Henley Management College says that boring meetings cost British industry nearly 8 billion pounds a year. Frankly I'm always suspicious of such surveys but the question about how to make meetings more productive is worth following up, regardless."
Big cheese: "We conducted some research or our own recently, and found that in meetings, people daydreamed at least once an hour. Men daydreamed about sex, and women mostly about food. And another thing people daydreamed about were other work tasks. So it just goes to show how boring meetings can be."
Me: "That's a pretty humourous statistic. Did you ask them how much they daydreamed outside meetings?"
Big cheese: "No. No, we didn't."
Me: (putting big red line through the previous thirty seconds' worth of notes): "Ah."
It brings to mind this story (courtesy of the anonymous UK PR blog, SpinBunny). I'm not sure if companies are putting out these silly surveys because they don't understand how journalists work, or more worringly, because they understand perfectly well how some journalists work.
For more anti-daft survey material, check out How To Lie With Statistics. Great book, which gives lots of tips on how companies use statistical tomfoolery to pull the wool over reporters' eyes (and by tomfoolery, I mean sophisticated tricks that an intelligent person might actually get fooled by, rather than what my interviewee tried on me today). You can read it in an evening. Should be on the mandatory reading list for any new journo, so we can stop the scourge of the bogus survey. Silly surveys: just say no! |
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