Nokia's misleading multi-tasking survey 3 Dec 2007

As you may be aware, Nokia recently conducted a study on multi-tasking behaviour amongst phone users - a study that (somewhat impressively) involved more than 5,000 respondents. The results of this research were made public at the end of last month with great fanfare in the guise of a press release entitled "Survey results confirm it: Women are better multi-taskers than men".

Upon reading the title of this press release, you probably nodded your head in recognition of the fact that Nokia's research confirms the commonly-held belief that women are better than men when it comes to doing several things at the same time...However, if you examine the research more closely, you'll find that the title of this press release is completely misleading.

Nokia's study took the form of a survey - which means that participants were asked questions about multi-tasking, rather than observed while multi-tasking. Thus, the study collected subjective opinion and not quantitative data. As a result, a more accurate title for the press release would have been: "Survey results confirm it: Women are considered better multi-taskers than men"...It's not as catchy a headline as "Survey results confirm it: Women are better multi-taskers than men", but it is the truth.

If Nokia had wanted to support its bold media-friendly assertion, it should have observed its 5,000 respondents using their mobile phones in the field (in a series of controlled multi-tasking scenarios) instead.

Issues of research methodology aside, a quick glance at that guts of the press release reveals this little contradictory nugget also:

"Forty-seven percent of respondents to the Nokia survey indicated that they have sent a romantic or controversial text message to the wrong person and 56 percent of women did that."

As the Product Usability Weblog points out, this makes Nokia's headline sound even more crazy:

"Right, women were better at multitasking, but somehow, more women send text messages to the wrong person than men do. To be more precise, 47% of the overall survey respondents indicated they did this, and 56% of the women did. Which means the number of men who have sent a sensitive text message to the wrong person must lay even below 47%, which is the overall percentage."

It therefore seems that all that Nokia's study actually proves is that people buy into a widely-held belief. Did it really have to survey 5,000 people to establish this?