By Fahd Al-Hazmi
FORMER British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli said: “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics.” Surveys, especially electronic ones, can be misleading for the simple reason that no survey can cover the opinions of all Saudis regarding a certain issue, e.g., women driving. The real problem lies with a sample that is biased and is not representative of the entire society.
A local daily recently reported that 59 percent of Saudi women are obese compared to 40 percent of Saudi men. I do not know if this percentage is accurate. However, if accurate, it means that six out of every 10 Saudi women are obese compared to four out of every 10 Saudi men. Has this survey covered all cities across the Kingdom and all social classes?
The method used for gathering the information seems unreliable. Male and female obesity rates on the Ministry of Health website differ from the ones in the survey. Additionally, the local daily did not mention anything about the sample, place and time of survey. No supporting information was provided.
Such surveys on local issues usually do not reflect the opinions of all members of the public. Moreover, many of these surveys appear in the form of votes on hot social issues and this renders them useless. This is because there is technology available that can help people cast their vote several times. How can we also possibly know that all voters were Saudi? There is no way to validate or verify the information.
In fact, several local dailies have published surveys about sensitive social issues over the past few months. The surveys lack supporting information. For example, a survey attributed rising domestic violence to poor levels of religiosity among people. The only way to determine the causes of domestic violence is to conduct a comprehensive study about it and meet with the victims. Asking members of the public to participate in such surveys is useless and will not give us accurate results.
Another example is the survey that showed that the daily productivity of public sector employees is less than one hour. Was the survey conducted on all government sectors in all cities? How was productivity measured?
I advise readers not to trust the results of surveys unless they answer the following questions: Who conducted and supervised the survey? How large was the population sample? How was information gathered? How were the questions formed?
