RESPONSE TO MEDIA QUERY ON APRIL 23rd PRESS RELEASE

We read with interest over the feedback elicited from the results to the survey which we released on 23rd April and would like to clear the air over a number of topics raised by various quarters:

  • The survey was conducted by telephone interviews which allows for a more representative distribution of respondents. In the context of this survey, respondents matching the age, gender and ethnic criteria based on the profile of the Election Commission’s electoral roll were selected and interviewed from every parliamentary constituency in Peninsula Malaysia.
  • The survey sample size affords a margin of error of less than ± 3.00% which is more than adequate to gain a response on a fairly clear matter of the respondents’ assessment of particular political leaders and other topics.
  • Although all surveys are not free from biases such as social desirability bias, our survey places great emphasis on statistical rigor to ensure reliability by controlling for various variables such as age groups, location i.e. urban vs rural along with socio-economic background so as to have a representative sample of the electorate.
  • Comparison with social media driven online surveys may result in misleading conclusions due to the difficulty in controlling for self-selection bias which means certain groups of people may be more motivated to respond compared to others. There is also the question as to whether controls for representativeness of the sample were put in place. Additionally, it should also be noted that Malaysian Twitter users are limited – less than 5% of the total population (source: https://gs.statcounter.com/social-media-stats/all/malaysia)
  • The survey topic in question was about the leader and should not be conflated, confused or transposed on other questions such as which party people would vote for in an election.

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