The Idea of a Survey
“Do you think if you were playing your very best tennis, you could win a point off Serena Williams?”
“One in eight men (12%) say they could win a point in a game of tennis against 23 time grand slam winner Serena Williams”
- First, if “Serena Williams” had been preceded by “23 time grand slam winner” in actual question that YouGov asked then I’m pretty sure that fewer people would have answered “yes”.
- Second, and more importantly, the actual question does not place a limit on the number of chances you get to win a point. Yet YouGov’s interpretation places a very low limit, specifically 4 chances, on your wiggle room. That’s a huge difference. Surely, some people thought something like the following: “if Serena serves 1,000 times eventually she’ll double fault so my best answer is ‘yes’”.
A match yields considerably fewer chances than 1,000 but far more chances than 4. In any case, the question says nothing about a match.Another wrinkle is that in online discussions some people emphasized the phrase “playing your very best tennis” which is in the actual question wording. In my opinion, this bit is only relevant to a tiny handful of people who are extremely good tennis players. But I don’t really know how other people might interpret and rate the importance of this phrase.“…the research firm ask[ed] British citizens whether they believed that they would be capable of winning a point in a tennis match against Serena Williams.”
Discussion
Speculate on what was actually measured by this question and propose further research that could test your speculations. And, please, be nice to each other!Survival Statistics: Secrets for Demystifying Numbers

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