A New Survey Finds….
When it’s a slow day out in medialand, you can always count on a survey to provide “news” to fill empty space. It’s well known that much so-called public opinion research is bogus, using non-random samples and asking questions that are designed to elicit particular responses. But even honest attempts to measure public opinion in a neutral way can founder on unanticipated problems. One of these recently caught my eye.
The subject, in the case, was financial literacy. Surveyors working for the central bank of the Netherlands wanted to know how much average households understand about basic financial matters. As part of a longer survey, half the participants were asked the following question:
*Buying a company stock usually provides a safer return than stock mutual fund. True or false?
The other half were given the question this way:
*Buying a stock mutual fund usually provides a safer return than a company stock. True or false?
It may seem to you that the second question was nothing more than the contrary of the first. yet the share of people answering correctly was twice as great when the question was asked the first way as when it was asked the second way. How could this have been? The answer, the researchers speculate, is that a large number of respondents may have been unfamiliar with words in the question. When the subject of the question was “company stock,” enough people apparently were sufficiently familiar with the concept not to find it “safer” than the alternative. When the subject was “stock mutual fund,” however, they did not know enough to make a judgment about its safety–even though they were comparing stock mutual funds to individual company stocks in both questions.
This finding is a good warning for those of us who consume media–-and for those who produce it. Surveys, even when well designed and carefully conducted, may not tell us what they claim to tell us. Skepticism is always in order, because we never know how the people surveyed understood the questions they were asked.
The survey I mention above is cited in Annemaria Lusardi and Olivia Mitchell, “The Economic Importance of Financial Literacy,” Journal of Economic Literature 52 (March 2014).
Tags: economics, research