[Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News] Yachad-UK poll of British Jews shown to use biased sampling methods

Last week, the leftist British group Yachad released a poll of British Jews which received wide coverage. Its main findings are summarized by The Guardian:

75% of British Jews agree that “the expansion of settlements on the West Bank is a major obstacle to peace”, and 68% have a “sense of despair” whenever new expansion is approved.
73% believe Israel’s approach to peace is damaging its standing in the world.
71% see the two-state solution as the only way Israel can achieve peace.
72% reject the statement that “the Palestinians have no legitimate claim to a land of their own”.
62% support ceding territory to achieve peace, but that falls to 50% if withdrawal is seen as posing a risk to Israel’s security.
47% see the Israeli government as “constantly creating obstacles to avoid engaging in the peace process” (32% disagreed).

UK Media Watch noted how the questions in the poll themselves were biased, but there is a far more fundamental problem with the sampling methodology itself.

Over 50% of the respondents were chosen this way (page 50):

A common method for recruiting a sample from an inaccessible population is to identify a group of individuals from the population and invite them to recruit other members who will both complete the questionnaire and invite still others to do the same. ‘Snowballing’ methods of this kind are capable of achieving relatively high response rates because of the element of personal contact, but they run the risk of (i) recruiting an uncontrolled and potentially unrepresentative sample, and (ii) allowing abuse by vested interest groups who may submit multiple responses or circulate links to large numbers of people within that interest group.

In order to mitigate these risks, we developed a discriminative snowballing methodology with the following features:

(i) a group of 72 initial contacts (seeds) was selected by the research team and advisory group such that the group was roughly representative of the Jewish community as a whole with respect to synagogue affiliation, age and geographical location.

(ii) each seed was then asked to send invitations by email to between 10 and 40 of their Jewish contacts asking them to participate; each contact received a personal and unique code that could only be used once (phase 1).

(iii) the phase 1 recipients, in addition to being asked to complete the survey themselves, were provided with three additional unique codes and asked to send those to Jewish contacts of their own (phase 2). We limited the number to three to prevent blanket responding.

(iv) the phase 2 recipients were also asked to send links to up to three contacts using the unique links that were displayed on screen on completion of the survey (phase 3). This methodology generated 568 responses, of which 444 were generated at phase 1 and 124 at phases 2 and 3

So the advisory group chose the initial seed which then recruited the remainder of the 568.

Who was on the advisory group?

10 of them are listed in the paper, and Jonathan Hoffman identified nine of the ten as leftists.

It is of course likely that the leftist group would recruit like-minded friends, who would again do the same in their next pass. Meaning that fully 50% of the respondents to this poll are from a likely biased set.

Like J-Street in the US, Yachad commissioned this poll to confirm their own attitudes towards Israel and to find - or create the illusion of - widespread criticism of the Jewish state that mirrors their attitudes. Which is exactly what happened.

How many supporters of Likud do you think would be in the initial 72 people chosen by this leftist "advisory panel?"  Yet two thirds  of British Jews said, before the Israeli elections,  that they would vote for Netanyahu if they were Israeli!

This is not just shoddy - this is deceptive.

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Posted By Elder of Ziyon to Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News at 11/17/2015 07:35:00 AM