Blue think tank poll on Taiwanese Youth & Military says opposite of Pollster's spin

UPDATE: The TT has revised the kicker. The headline is still wrong, but at least a corrective gale blew through the office. I've substantially revised the post.


Youth will not fight for Taiwan: poll

A survey released yesterday showed that 45.8 percent of young people born after 1984 agreed that Taiwan is an independent nation separate from China, while almost 60 percent of the respondents said that people have the right to refuse military conscription in the event of war against China.

The 21st Century Foundation, a local think tank, released the survey to explore the “sense of efficacy” of the generation toward cross-strait peace, attempting to find what they think are the ways to achieve peace and whether it is possible to reconcile cross-strait peace with preservation national sovereignty.

The survey said.....

"The survey found that 57 percent of the respondents agreed that people have the right to refuse to be conscripted into the military if a war breaks out because of Taiwan’s declaration of independence, while 43 percent disagreed.

An analysis of these two questions showed that 31.6 percent of the respondents do not want to be mobilized for military duty and would rather surrender in case of military conflict between Taiwan and China, Chang said."

Read it yourself -- nearly 60% said that others should not be forced to fight, and only 31% said that they do not want to be mobilized for duty. The number of people who said that they would go if mobilized is almost 70%, exactly opposite of what the headline says .

The TT then goes on to accept the spin that the lead researcher puts on the article without any corrective save provision of the numbers...

The survey reflected the “pragmatic attitudes” of young people in Taiwan toward cross-strait issues, he added.

“They do not want to sacrifice their lives for sovereignty,” Chang said of the findings.

The numbers are right there: not only do nearly 70% appear to be willing to be mobilized for duty but according to the survey, 51.7% agreed that Chinese invaders have to be resisted even if the government itself throws in the towel!

Asked whether they think people in Taiwan have to fight against China until the end, even if the government has stopped resisting when China forces Taiwan into unification, 48.3 percent of the respondents disagreed, and 51.7 percent agreed.

Apparently just over half the "strawberries" are bloody-minded bastards who will fight to the bitter end!

The other thing about this amazing presentation that bothered me was the reference to the 21st Century Foundation as "a local think tank." A two second search on Google turned up this collection of slides. Here are the top three people:

You only have to look at the positions and institutional commitments of these three individuals to know that this "thinktank" is a pro-Blue foundation. This probably should have been made clear by the Taipei Times. If you keep reading the slides, the thinktank's agricultural programs appear to be part of a program to transfer Taiwan's ag tech to China.

Finally, how about this research project:

Chang called the research a “pioneering study” because it combined qualitative and quantitative methods of conducting focus group interviews with senior high school and college students. A total of 719 copies of questionnaires were completed either online or through face-to-face interviews, and the respondents had connections to the research team rather than being randomly selected.

The paper's presentation is confusing. The use of "face-to-face" implies one on one interviews but focus groups were used, in which students were interviewed in groups (reflect for a moment on how Taiwanese talk about politics in groups). The idea that combining qualitative and quantitative work is somehow pioneering is laughable; there are a gazillion such studies (I am part of a team that has published one such study myself). I am sure the author knows that, and believe the author wanted to emphasize the pioneering nature of the study stems from its sample size and population, not combo of qual/quan triangulation. If you read the paragraph on how the students define China and Taiwan, it appears that a Blue-skewed population was selected.

However, if you read the paper's description, it says that participants were non-randomly selected. Yes, that's right, the sample population consists of non-random internet users and students familiar to the research team. Representativeness is thus a serious issue. Since the pro-China political commitments of the Foundation are painfully obvious, what we are really looking at is a study from a pro-KMT source that nevertheless says that Taiwanese students are majority bitter enders.

Now that's news the paper should have promoted.
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