Only 60%? You’ve got to be joking!
By Masterwordsmith
I was grinning from ear to ear when I read that a recent survey conducted by Merdeka Center showed that six out of 10 Malaysians don’t trust the mainstream media while only one out of five has access to online news.
The Malaysian Insider reported HERE that the survey showed:
Malays
57 per cent polled said they did not trust reports in the mainstream media
33 per cent trusted the media
10 per cent said they did not know.
Chinese community
58 per cent said they did not trust the mainstream media
30 per cent trusted
12 per cent did not know.
Only 590 Chinese and 413 Malays as well as five focus group discussions with Chinese voters in Peninsula Malaysia were involved in the survey.
The Malaysian Insider report said that recent circulation figures show English and Malay-language newspapers like New Straits Times, The Star, Berita Harian and Utusan Malaysia have all suffered significant drop in circulation this year compared to 2009, with some as severe as 20 per cent.
As always, I question the validity of the results a 590 + 413 respondents = 1003 respondents which represent 0.003714814% of the population.
Seriously, I do not know why they bother to conduct a survey based on such a small sample size and how the media can highlight such results.
*yawns*
It has happened so often until I am quite fed up with the way the media and authorities play up on the results (to their advantage of course) even though the findings are highly questionable from the viewpoint of research methodology. I won’t even bother to mention previous studies as I have blogged about it and lamented about the research value of such studies which appear to have issues with reliability, validity and representativeness.
For my graduation thesis alone, I used a much bigger sample and one that reflected the demography of my sample location.
Nonetheless, we can see that there is a high probability that the results reported may actually be masking the truth.
Read more at: http://masterwordsmith-unplugged.blogspot.com/2010/08/only-60-youve-got-to-be-joking.html
