Unrepresentative big surveys significantly overestimated US vaccine uptake.

ABSTRACT: Surveys are a crucial tool for understanding public opinion and behaviour, and their accuracy depends on maintaining statistical representativeness of their target populations by minimizing biases from all sources. Increasing data size shrinks confidence intervals but magnifies the effect of survey bias: an instance of the Big Data Paradox¹. Here we demonstrate this paradox in estimates of first-dose COVID-19 vaccine uptake in US adults from 9 January to 19 May 2021 from two large surveys: Delphi-Facebook^2,3 (about 250,000 responses per week) and Census Household Pulse⁴ (about 75,000 every two weeks). In May 2021, Delphi-Facebook overestimated uptake by 17 percentage points (14-20 percentage points with 5% benchmark imprecision) and Census Household Pulse b

SUBMITTER: Bradley VC 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8653636 | biostudies-literature | 2021 Dec

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature