overview

This profile considers opinion polling and audience measurement (sizes, demographics and consumption patterns). It supplements the Internet Metrics & Statistics guide, the Marketing guide and other resources on this site.

The following pages cover -

• opinion polls - and other social statistics mechanisms for identifying values and behaviour
• audiences - the art of identifying who is listening, reading or viewing.
• consumers - identifying what is being purchased (and, as importantly, what is being used) and why
• questions - a discussion of questions about online and offline surveys
• chronology - landmarks in opinion polling and audience measurement.

     making sense of figures

As starting points for considering some of the figures we recommend Darrell Huff's How To Lie With Statistics (New York: Norton 1993), which hasn't been substantially updated since its first appearance in the early 1950s but remains a classic. John Paulos' A Mathematician Reads The Newspaper (New York: Anchor 1996) is a similarly lighthearted look at the use and abuse of mathematics in the mass and specialist media. Joel Best's Damned Lies & Statistics: Untangling Numbers From The Media, Politicians & Activists (Berkeley: Uni of California Press 2001) is harder going but perhaps more valuable.

Ian Hacking's The Taming of Chance (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni Press 1990), Theodore Porter's The Rise of Statistical Thinking, 1820-1900 (Princeton: Princeton Uni Press 1988), Statistics on the Table: The History of Statistical Concepts and Methods (Cambridge: Harvard Uni Press 1999) and The History of Statistics: The Measurement of Uncertainty Before 1900 (Cambridge: Belknap Press 1988) by Stephen Stigler offer historical introductions to methodologies, concepts such as the 'average man' and the statistical worldview. The Lady Tasting Tea: How Statistics Revolutionized Science in the Twentieth Century (San Francisco: Freeman 2001) by David Salsburg is thinner but perhaps more accessible for non-specialists.

For New Zealand see A History of Statistics in New Zealand (Wellington: Bateson 1999) edited by H S Roberts and featuring comments such as

Working with a statistician is like eating a steak with a dog under the table. You eat all the good bits yourself and give the dog the grisly bits and he'll bite your leg if you don't.

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