THE media love surveys, and the wackier the findings the more the public is entertained.

Business, however, is not looking for laughs or for messages from tea leaves. It is seeking authoritative predictions of human behaviour, based on representative samples.

Millions of pounds can be won or lost both on the accuracy of these surveys and on the correct interpretation of the results.

Market researchers are at pains to stress the scientific nature of their work, and most make a point of emphasising the margin of error.

But while it is one thing to conduct a survey in a professional manner, it is quite another to ask the right questions in the first place and then to work out what the results mean.

All this can all go horribly wrong, and the market is littered with the graves of products and services that were launched on the back of faulty research.

Not surprisingly, there is still much suspicion of market research and a widespread belief that you can prove anything you like with statistics.

The messengers - the researchers themselves - tend to get the blame for hyping up survey findings, but in reality it is more often the people interpreting or promoting the results who get this wrong.

A recent survey of crime statistics produced some astonishing results and caused much excitement.

Nobody pointed out that these figures, which were being applied to the entire country, were in fact based on a sample of 6,000 people. This is well above the 1,001 minimum which statisticians says is a valid sample, but it is still only around one-10,000th of the UK population.

No one should base big decisions on samples as tiny as this. Yes, business must have research to help it make decisions, but it takes a lot more than this to get it right.

When good research is used in the context of gut feeling based on long experience, business is far more likely to make good decisions. It may be unscientific and it is certainly not infallible, but it is more likely to lead to success.

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