The Sun’s pollsters criticised for methodology used in controversial survey story

The story, headlined “1 in 5 Brit Muslims’ sympathy for jihadis” was based on the poll’s finding that 19.5% of those surveyed said they had either ‘a lot’ or ‘some’ sympathy with young Muslims who leave the UK to join fighters in Syria.

However, according to a story on The Guardian news site, the company that carried out the survey — Survation — used a method claimed by rivals to not necessarily result in a representative sample of the British Muslim population. The method involved picking out potential respondents with the help of an academic expert on naming – it filtered its database of 42 million profiles against a list of 1,500 Muslim surnames, and then asked whether the people that this method had identified were Muslim or not before proceeding with the survey.

According to the story, The Sun’s regular pollsters YouGov refused to do the poll as it couldn’t be confident of accurately representing the British Muslim population within the timeframe and budget set by the paper. The representativeness of the sample apparently cannot be determined due to a lack of socioeconomic and demographic details on the respondents.

There has also been criticism of the wording of the statement used in the survey, with some claiming that the word “sympathy” was open to misinterpretation, and also that who is meant by “fighters in Syria” was not made clear.