Accurate surveys by reputable company not good enough?

It's amazing how people tend to hold such a narrow focus on life that they will disregard any and all evidence that runs contrary to what they personally believe.

Earlier this year, the Times-Herald commissioned Leger Marketing of Montreal — the largest independent marketing firm in Canada with a huge reputation to maintain — and supplied a handful of questions for its staff to put to a random sampling of Moose Jaw residents. The questions were in no way leading — had they been such, Leger would have rephrased them. The people calling on behalf of Leger called from another province, called numbers at random and posed the questions.

Leger Marketing has no interest in the results of the survey, no reason to skewer results, no reason to do anything but maintain it's national reputation for conducting unbiased, independent research.

Yet we are still getting comments from people saying we chose who would participate, the questions were leading in order to get the answers we wanted and that the survey of 301 people is not representative of the people in Moose Jaw.

How can that be true? The survey was 100 per cent random — only Leger Marketing knows what phone numbers were used — this is a major national company not interested in sacrificing its reputation for a survey on Moose Jaw by skewering questions and results, and all surveys are random "samplings" of a population. When political polls are released, not every Canadian is called — usually only about 1,000 — but the number of people surveyed and chosen randomly is supposed to give a sampling of the entire population — we accept that.

But a lot of people in Moose Jaw hold so strongly to their personal biases on some topics that they cannot accept anything that runs contrary to that.

The majority of those contacted this year still support the multiplex. A wide majority of the people surveyed gave Mayor Glenn Hagel and — by a smaller majority — city council their stamp of approval. Like it or not, it would appear people in this community are basically satisfied with how things are going.

Just because you and your buddies were not asked, or just because the results run contrary to what you and your circle of friends believe doesn't make it untrue.

We are finished running our survey results. We found it quite interesting to take a quick pulse check on the community and as much as we'd love to do this more often, it was a costly venture.

Those people who understand how random surveys work probably also found the results interesting. If nothing else, it makes for interesting "water cooler talk" around the office or at the supper table.