A survey generated by Groupon has reportedly found how women in Britain ‘spend an average £70,294 on their appearance in their lifetime’. This survey asked 1000 women, who use the sight ‘Groupon’ about the items they buy, focusing on buying habits centred on their looks. This report presents how the ‘average woman’ spends around over £100 a month for beautification purposes, however does not define their term of an ‘average British Woman’. This report is viable for critiques as it is inaccurate due to the British women being generalized, claiming how on average British women spend a gargantuan sum of money on their appearance, when in reality this survey doesn’t represent the whole population of British women and only represents the average in the 1000 female participants. As this survey calculated the ‘average’ the number may not be an accurate representation, this is because when determining an average of data, it only take one or two very high results to determine the overall average. Therefore, if a one of the 1000 participants in this survey spent an average of £8000 a year on produced centred on appearance and another participant only spend £200 a year, the average would be high as the higher number would increase the overall average. If this survey were to question a different 1000 women, the average may be lower therefore the article would be diverse and less shocking. Also this news article claim is biased as it only samples members from a particular organisation, which limits the number of participants.
As only 1000 women were asked, this article generalizes the population claiming that the ‘average British woman’ spend the same amount as each other and are similar. If not read critically this article may be misleading as people may believe that all women on average in the Britain spend the same amount of money on their appearance as each other. However this may not be the case, as the news article generalizes its data to describe all women in the Britain, when the news article only focuses on 1000 who are members of the specific group. This survey is a representation for women who may not wear makeup and therefore do not spend money on it, or women who are not members of the sight; therefore is an inaccurate generalization and an unreliable claim.
Further into the article, the claim of ’23 percent of women said they would consider cosmetic surgery’ is fashioned. Although this percentage is most likely to be taken from the research conducted to form the rest of the article, it does not specify where the percentage is calculated. This claim also generalizes the population as it doesn’t state that the percentage is from the 1000 participants of the survey, therefore people who read the news article may believe that the 23% is based on all women. It is important for articles to establish were there results are from as 23% of 1000 is going to be a different number of women compared to 23% of the female population in Britain. For example 23% of 1000 women is 230 women, however 23% of women in the whole of UK-not just Britain- is 7,406,000 as the population of women in the UK is around 32.2 million. This evidently shows how important it is to define the terms in the claim such as the population as a claim which represents a larger population than the one surveyed is generalizes and therefore frequently inaccurate.
http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/fashion/average-british-woman-spend-70000-appearance-lifetime-cosmetics-beauty-products-groupon-uk-a7623201.html