Thanks to Kevin Pearce at the NFU, some of the figures about the badger cull survey and the points that I raised have been clarified - that's great. You can read what Kevin said on his blog - http://kevinpearce.wordpress.com/2011/08/22/public’s-attitude-to-a-badger-cull/, but in brief, the 62% figure was referring to all people who had been asked whether they believed badgers spread TB to cattle, including - and this is the important bit - the people who neither agreed or disagreed. If you add in the people who definitely didn't agree, then the overall support for a cull drops to 52%, but still a majority as Kevin points out.
This raises three questions - all methodological, but one more interesting than the other (perhaps). Skip to the end if you want the interesting stuff and not the lesson in social research methods.
The first is what to do with people who are unsure, or don't know the answer to a question? Do you include them in your analysis? Are people who are unsure (neither agree or disagree) conceptually different from people who don't know? Can you even know that in a short survey? Does it matter anyway? Some interesting questions for methodology geeks, but perhaps with no clear answer, or answers that make much difference anyway? Certainly, it would be interesting to look further at this data. In particular the people who are unsure about badgers passing TB onto cattle: how do they respond to the cull question, are there differences between them in their response in terms of where they live, age, gender etc
Second, what starts to become clear from this analysis are the segments of the population and how their views vary. This is vital for marketing. Clearly from the NFU's survey, those people who agree that badgers pass TB to cattle and are in favour of a cull make up about 30% of the population. And there's about another third who are unsure but agree with a cull and about another third for whom there should never be a cull . It's that middle third - the floaters - where the NFU and others are likely to target their communications. There's no point trying to convince the convinced or the never likely to be convinced. This perhaps is the real value of the survey to the NFU. The analysis not published should give them a breakdown of the kind of people likely to support a cull, and they could if they wanted try to target them, or appeal to their values. It's the sort of thing that politicians do, where the idea of mondeo man and Worcester woman came from.
Finally, and most interesting, is that this analysis now seems to be different from the BBCs survey. The NFU say 62% support a cull, the BBC say the same oppose it. How come there's a difference? Well there's not is there. The difference is in the questions that are asked. I don't actually have the wording of the BBC's survey to hand, and it's a shame they are not more open with the survey data they collect given that it's publicly funded. But the NFU, credit to them, have said what their question was:
Would you be in support of a legal cull of badgers, as part of a range of measures, in specific areas in order to control bovine TB?
This is wholly different to saying do you support a badger cull, yes or no? It's saying in these circumstances do you support a badger cull? And the circumstances help to make agreeing more acceptable. It's the same finding as Defra's citizens panels which concluded that people agree with a cull so long as.........
So the methodological lesson is that you can't compare results from two different surveys unless they ask the same question. This means that it's still not correct to conclude that a majority of the population support a badger cull UNLESS those provisos are included in the headline. This kind of thing happens often, because headline writers want something snappy and not conditional.
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