Which country read the most | Hacker News Reader

Which country read the most

mentalfloss.com

9 pointsulam212 comments

There's something fishy about this infographic.

"The Culture Score Index Series is based on further analysis of the NOP World Roper Reports Worldwide(TM) survey, which includes in-depth personal interviews with more than 30,000 people age 13 and older in 30 countries between December 2004 and February 2005."

This is a relatively minuscule sample compared to India's population which is ~= 1.3Billion in 2004/2005. Same applies for many other countries. The results are not indicative at all.

I am from India and I am pretty sure that Indian people are not the best readers in the world.

As disappointing as the sample size is (average 1k people per country), more important is the absence of info of where they all come from (pessimism says 1 city). (optimism says 2)

It's easy to think that but it's not true. Regardless of population size, providing a sample is truly random, a sample size of 300 is enough to measure with an accuracy of + or - 3%. Increasing sample size much beyond this does not meaningfully increase accuracy.

An analogy I've found useful thinking about this is, if you have a pot of soup, tasting a teaspoon is enough to figure out whether the soup is oversalted or not, regardless of the size of the soup pot, providing the soup is well mixed.

Assuming the set is homogeneous! Which in this case, is not. A sample extracted from a more or less financially stable region of the country will have drastically different output than a sample extracted from a poorer area. Your assumption about 'the soup well mixed' is less probable to be true, given the lack of any evidence supporting the claim that this study is either meaningful or properly executed.

Right, if there's a flaw in the study, it's in the representativeness, not the sample size.

Reading what? Newspapers? This survey is meaningless. At least use the number of books as your measure. Maybe what this shows is that the UK has the fastest readers in the world.

On the other hand in my experience readership is rather poor in the UK. All I hear at work is how amazing some TV programme was and you'd expect positive sample bias in a software shop.

As a UK citizen, I find this pretty depressing. It doesn't mention what form of reading it's measuring, though. BTW, usability tip: if you have to write "Don't squint" next to something, that's a sure tip that you're doing it wrong.

Judging from the linked article [1] other competing activities (TV, radio, etc) all seem like discretionary ones, so I would guess that it is referring to "leisure" reading, rather than reading as part of work. Likely to be mainly fiction too.

[1] http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/nop-world-culture-sc...

It is pretty depressing. On a more positive note: if you look at this list of books published per country per year, the UK does pretty well (even better if you divide the number of books by population)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Books_published_per_country_per...

It suggests there is at least an appetite to purchase books in the UK - even if we're not reading them!

Hmmm, India has a literacy rate below 75 percent and we're supposed to believe that on average they read the most in the world?

Well, if you're Indian and can take the survey you're probably in the pool of well educated who can read. Poor survey, extreme sample bias, HN deserves better.

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