The University of Toronto Students’ Union (UTSU) dropped out of the ongoing student societies summit this Friday March 7,, citing other parties’ unwillingness to compromise. In support of this decision, Agnes So — vice president, university affairs — presented a study conducted by the union to garner members’ opinion of the unions’ involvement in the summit. According to So, of the 1200 students who participated in the survey, 80 per cent stated that they did not want the UTSU to continue participating in the summit.
The survey was met with indignation from student leaders involved in the summit, who argued it was disingenuous and leading in nature. The Varsity contacted statistics professors from the University of Waterloo and U of T to get their take on the survey.
The survey asks that students pick one of three options; professor John Braun from the University of Western Ontario felt that there was a bias present in the second option, which read: “I believe that the UTSU’s Bylaws and Policies and fees should be decided by other student organizations with different mandates, who stand to gain thousands of dollars in the process to boost their own services at the expense of UTSU services.”
Braun was particularly concerned by the inclusion of the phrase: “who stand to gain thousands of dollars.” Braun said: “Anyone not familiar with the situation might be swayed into sympathy for the union’s position.”
Braun explained that the survey is simply not statistically valid as: “the sampling design does not meet the requirements of simple random sampling or any other recognized sampling design.”
He went on to question the fairness of having the union carry out the survey:
“The union should not be conducting the survey. This induces bias (the preamble itself represents their bias). A neutral third party should conduct such a survey.”
Western University professor Matt Davison, who is also the Canada Research Chair in Quantitative Finance, also raised questions about the design of the survey:
“When we get to the survey, it was clear to me that the desired response was the third. The other two responses seemed to have language in them underlining that the actions they proposed were in some way quite undesirable.”
Davison outlined how it is hard to conduct any survey without introducing some potential bias, and that to do so may lead to: “spending more money than a student council budget might have.”
Nancy Reid, professor of statistics here at U of T, said that she found the survey questions “confusing, but not especially misleading.”
Reid did raise a concern about the types of students included in the survey though: “This would not likely give a completely representative sample of all the students at the University of Toronto, since students not on campus or in class on the day(s?) the survey was conducted would not be included.”
With files from Liza Agrba
