A couple of months ago, Statistics Canada published some data on trust in institutions, including the media. Unfortunately, the agency’s choice to publish “some data” but not all the data created some confusion. They reported the proportion of Canadians who had “high confidence” or “a high level of trust” in the media, but the rest of the responses were not shown. Inevitably, some commentators assumed that everyone who didn’t have a high level of trust had no or low trust in the media. Based on that assumption, the picture looked a little bleak.
This is why survey researchers should accompany their reports with data tables showing the complete range of responses (among other pieces of information). Having now obtained the full data, we can present a more complete picture.
Here’s what Statistics Canada actually found, asking two different questions and using two different response scales.
Making sense of these results is not straightforward – a lot depends on how you choose to group the responses together. But the overall pattern is clear: some Canadians (roughly about one in ten) have a very low opinion of the media, but the majority cluster at the midpoint of the scales or just above.
To simplify things, here are the results again, but with the individual points of the scale grouped together – and this time with a third question (from our own survey) added in for comparison (the complete data for that question is available here). Keep in mind there is no single, correct way to group the responses – which is part of the challenge with numeric scales.
The Statistics Canada question about confidence in the media shows that 37 percent of Canadians give an answer above the midpoint of a 5-point scale – which is what the agency referred to as “high confidence.” A smaller proportion (27%) give an answer below the midpoint (so, according to this question, Canadians are more likely to express high confidence in the media than they are to express low confidence). And 36 percent are in the middle – suggesting they have at least some confidence in the media.
In short, although a significant minority of Canadians have low confidence in the media, a majority (73%) are at the midpoint of the confidence scale, or higher.
The general pattern is the same for the other two questions (though the scales and question wording are quite different). When Canadians are asked if they generally trust the news or information they receive from the media, just under one in two give an answer above the midpoint of the scale, and 69 percent at the midpoint or higher. For our question from the AmericasBarometer about trusting the mass media, 61 percent are at the midpoint or higher.
Assessing whether Canadians, on the whole, trust the media therefore depends on where you draw the line on the scales: whether you include only those at the highest end of the scale, or everyone above the midpoint, or everyone from the midpoint upwards, and so on. Based on this choice, the proportion of Canadians who have confidence in or trust the media (depending on the question wording) can range anywhere from less than 20 percent to over 70 percent.
It also depends on the meaning we give to the numbers of the scale, using terms that do not actually appear in the survey: we can say that certain responses signal “high confidence” and others mean “some confidence” or “low confidence” – but that’s not actually what the people surveyed said (they just chose a number). It is this need to make choices about how to organize, label and interpret the responses that makes it so important to show all the data – so that readers have the information they need to concur or to second-guess.
In the end, though, looking at individual survey questions can only tell us so much. Are these results good or bad? To answer that question, we need to look at two more things: how does trust in the media compare to trust in other institutions, and how have levels of trust changed over time?
More on those topics coming in the next post in this series.
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