13.4 Questions to Ask
Unless surveys are done correctly, the sample data will be flawed. If you start with a biased sample, it won’t matter how well you do the subsequent analysis. Your conclusions are not reliable.
Most businesses don’t conduct their own surveys. They rely on data that someone else collects. To get the most out of surveys, whether you analyze the data yourself or read someone else’s analysis, make sure that you can answer a few questions about the origins of the sample. Most summaries of surveys omit these issues, so you might have to ask for more details. We’ve talked about the first two:
What was the sampling frame? Does it match the population?
Is the sample a simple random sample? If not, what is the sampling design?
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