I'm not completely sure if this blog entry really fulfils the objective of this weeks objective of finding a resource which 'lies with statistics' but this is something which I have personal experience of which may be called 'misrepresentation by not communicating all the facts' and it definitely put the cat amongst the pigeons where I work a few years ago! Private hospitality education in Switzerland is a business and competitive advantage is something to strive for. This means that surveys, league tables, etc, are very important marketing tools. Back in 2013 two particular schools used research undertaken by TNS to promote their schools as they had come very high on the league table provided (Source: TNS Global Survey, 2013) The results and indeed the survey itself was met with confusion by many other schools. Firstly, no one within the other schools had been contacted or informed about the survey (though of course in an impartial research project there was no reason to assume that they would be contacted) nor asked to provide any assistance in comprising the data source (in this instance senior management within the hospitality industry). The results themselves were very interesting as schools which had ranked much higher in other, more well established league tables were lower down the pecking order (for example, Cornell which is kind of like the Harvard/Yale of hospitality education in the US).
Looking beyond the website marketing and to the research paper itself, there were some glaringly obvious causes for concern of the validity of the research but also a lot of 'vagueness'. The first 'mmm' was the fact that the research itself had been funded by the education group who run the two schools which found themselves above Cornell. To the researchers credit this was made very clear to anyone who made the effort to find the research paper itself. However, there was no indication of the methodology used in sampling their participants. How were they chosen? What criteria was used? This is not made clear and therefore left the research open to interpretations and assumptions (being that the majority of participants had been provided by the funding body). I think this was the main area where if the researchers had been more transparent the research could have been improved and in fact supported their findings more thoroughly.
1 Comment
James, Teaching Assistant
11/15/2017 12:59:35 pm
Hello Lisa, I enjoyed reading your blog post here and it made me wonder whether apparently positive statistics can sometimes work against an organisation that the numbers immediately present in a good light.
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AuthorLisa Peel - MSc student, Librarian and permanently exhausted ArchivesCategories |