The results of the summer readers’ poll (1)

Thank you to over 2300 people who responded to my recent readers’ survey. Here are some summary results.

First a few words about how the data were collected.  People were asked to participate in four ways: through this blog, through my newsblast, through tweets on Twitter and through Facebook. In all those cases, anyone coming across the survey could have passed it on to others. However, since we start with people connected to this blog, and to me in some way, then the respondents are in no way intended to be a representative sample of the UK population. And you aren’t – you’re very much like me!

Now a few words about how the responses were analysed. For many questions you were asked to give your opinion on a scale from 0-10. In most cases the two most ‘firm’ options, 0 and 9, received most of the responses and in some cases they received well over 80% of them. So in analysing the results I have called those ticking options 0, 1 and 2 as being of one view, those ticking 9, 8 or 7 as being of the opposing view, and regarded those in the middle, ticking 3, 4, 5 or 6, as being undecided, uninterested, unsighted or middle of the road (there weren’t many, as you’ll see, in this category).

And so when I say that the respondents were very like me that means that they were: 70% male (!), 56% aged 50-69 (5% younger than 30;  27% 30-49 years; and 12% >69 years), 70% supporting Remain, 68% Labour (and 32% Conservative if those were the only choices), 88% convinced climate change is real, 80% convinced it has an anthropogenic cause, 95% convinced it will cause problems for people, 64% convinced that we can do something about it, 69% against grouse shooting, 81% don’t think there are too many birds of prey and that they are causing problems for wildlife, 74% in favour of rewilding, and 71% against a badger cull.

So, yes, you are like me. And we aren’t typical.  It’s a pity really!

Because I asked these questions in 2016, just before the Brexit/Remain referendum, it’s tempting to compare the results of then and now. Tempting, but not very useful (although I will summarise them).

In 2016 there were 1500+ respondents whereas this year there were 2300+ respondents – so at the very least there were 800 new people involved, and there is no claim that either group of respondents was representative of the population as a whole so we can’t meaningfully compare the results. But if we did, then we’d find that all the things that I believe (see above) have become a bit less strongly represented in the 2019 respondents. Is this because people have changed their minds or is it because these are a different segment of people for some reason? It’s impossible to tell. Except it’s not entirely impossible to tell because some pro-grouse shooting social media accounts were encouraging their followers to take part in the survey to ‘help’ Mark Avery out. This is fair enough and I’m not complaining about it. In fact, it was rather handy for what I intended to do with the results anyway – so thank you for that.

In a blog at 12:45 today I will show you an analysis of the views of those most keen on grouse shooting compared with those least keen – it’s a stark contrast.

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