Do 25% of children really have their own mobiles? Invalid Research Example #01

Last Updated on December 21, 2018 by Karl Thompson

This is a ‘new thread’ idea… posting up examples of naff research. I figure there are two advantages to this…

  1. It’s useful for students to have good examples of naff research, to show them the meaning of ‘invalid data’ or ‘unrepresentative samples’, or in this case, just plain unreferenced material which may as well be ‘Fake News’.
  2. At least I get some kind of pay back (in the form of the odd daily post) for having wasted my time wading through this drivel.

My first example is from The Independent, the ex-newspaper turned click-bait website.

I’ve been doing a bit of research on smart phone usage statistics this week and I came across this 2018 article in the Independent: Quarter of Children under 6 have a smartphone, study finds.

invalid research.png

The article provides the following statistics

  • 25% of children under 6 now have their own mobile
  • 12% of children under 6 spend more than 24 hours a week on their mobile
  • 80% parents admit to not limiting the amount of time their children spend on games

Eventually it references a company called MusicMagpie (which is an online store) but fails to provide a link to the research,  and provides no information at all about the sampling methods used or other details of the survey (i.e. the actual questions, or how it’s administered.). I dug around for a few minutes, but couldn’t find the original survey either.

The above figures just didn’t sound believable to me, and they don’t tie in with OFCOM’s 2017 findings which say that only 5% of 5-7 year olds and 1% of 3-4 year olds have their own mobiles.

As it stands, because of the simple fact that I can’t find details of the survey, these research findings from musicMagpie are totally invalid.

I’m actually quite suspicious that the two companies have colluded to generate some misleading click-bait statistics to drive people to their websites to increase advertising and sales revenue.

If you cannot validate your sources, then do not use the data!

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