Best Practice Stats Reporting (Almost) 

 Let鈥檚 salute the New York Time鈥檚 for its near perfect polling documentation.  In a recent edition of the Sunday Magazine, the Times includes a two-page spread on a phone survey on New York City politics. Though the survey touches on some life-and-death issues (鈥淲ould you ever date a Republican?鈥?), it鈥檚 really more for laughs than higher learning. Regardless, the Times goes to great length to describe its methodology: 

 鈥淢ethodology: This telephone poll of a random sample of 1,011 adults in New York City was conducted for the New York Times Magazine by Blum &Weprin Associates Inc. between Aug. 29 and Sept. 1. The sample was based on a random-digital-dialing design that draws numbers from all existing telephone exchanges in the five boroughs of New York, giving all numbers, listed and unlisted, a proportionate chance of being included. Respondents were selected randomly within the household and offered the option of being interviewed in Spanish. The overall sample results were weighted demographically and geographically to population data.  The estimated average sample tolerance for data from the survey is plus or minus 3 percent at the 95 percent confidence level. Sampling error for subgroups is higher. Sampling is only one source of error. Other sources of error may include question wording, question order and interviewer effects.鈥?  

 That鈥檚 146 words on survey sampling likely lost on many readers. We may quibble about the omission of the nonresponse rate (although they mention that results were weighted to represent known geographic and demographic distributions). We may find the phrase 鈥渟ample tolerance鈥? for 鈥渃onfidence interval鈥? a tad confusing. We may protest that they forgot a comma before the 鈥渁nd鈥? in the closing enumeration.  But that鈥檚 about it.   

 I would cry tears of joy if the major papers in my native Germany would start taking survey sampling nearly as seriously as the Times. Instead, we get anecdote-laden head scratching over recent failures to predict national election results with anything approaching accuracy. Seriously, I know Europeans aren鈥檛 currently inclined to follow American examples. But how would attention to basic statistical ethics work for an exception?