@Anonymalous wrote:
@Beefy1212 wrote:I missed the link when I was reading the article, thanks for pointing that out...
They asked just under 2,500 people less than 2,000 of which actually had a credit card... The error of margin of that before even factoring for lying/errors is through the roof.
"Total sample size was 2,486 adults, among whom 1,919 were cardholders"
that is a ratio of roughly 1:651,400 people to credit card accounts
Surveys are one of the lowest quality sources of data on anything.
You're welcome. I'm often skeptical about surveys myself, but the things that make me skeptical are question framing (how the questions are worded can massively influence the conclusions), when the margin of error is large compared to the results (i.e. when they're trying to measure something that only applies to a small part of the population), and whether the survey was well designed. The size of the survey is rarely an issue, because 1,000 or so is large enough to get the margin of error down to a few percentage points.
And for carrying a balance, a survey of individuals is probably far more reliable than trying to suss out the results from, say, the information collected by the credit bureaus (which doesn't actually track that information, so they'd have to infer it from statement balances). My main concerns would be how the question was phrased, whether most respondents know what "carrying a balance" really means, and whether they got some real statisticians to conduct the survey instead of a marketing group or journalists.
Yea, I am not sure the confidence level on data with particularly high on ratios of surveyed to actual numbers. About 84% of Americans have a credit card and less than 75% of those asked had a card, that is already not a reflective demographic sample to real world, then when taking possible errors with questions and knowledge competence of those sampled it is very easy to come up with answer a few abnormalities skew results.
I would also be curious what the geographic distribution of those surveyed is the results of NYC, LA, Chicago likely have very little to do with what is going on in OKC.
100k is borderline poverty in much of NYC, but is living like a king in the suburbs of OKC.
