Awareness, extent and nature of Business Continuity amongst managers - Essay Example

This review examines one such document that has used statistical data inaccurately to bolster its claims. In the present document by the Chartered Management Institute (2002), responses of participants over three sets of similar data are reviewed and compared to try and understand trends that exist in some areas of business management. The survey results have been based on a response rate of just over 13%, with no observation about the representativeness of the responses collected. When the response rate is so low, it is difficult to establish the representativeness of the report (Burns, Burns and Burns, 2008).

This can pose a challenge, since it is quite likely that the responses received may be skewed to favour a certain type of respondent and may thus not be representative of the entire business community at all (Downing and Clark, 2010). This makes many of the conclusions drawn by the report suspect. A second glaring issue that comes across instantly is that while the survey makes claims about changes in the trends observed from 1999 till 2002, no tests have been reported that test the actual significance of these changes (Burns, Burns and Burns, 2008).

For some of the categories reviewed, there are changes as small as a couple of percentages across the three surveys reported. From the data used, it is difficult to verify whether these changes have occurred due to an actual change is the experiences of respondents or whether the observed changes are due to sampling error (Guilford and Fruchter, 1973). Thus, it is quite likely that some of the variations in responses could be due to natural fluctuation and may not be true chances in trends at all.

In some parts of the report, only a part of the trends observed have been used to define the nature of changes. Although the report claims to be studying changes as they occur from 1999 till 2002, when discussing some of the fear of threats and the extent of business plans