Election 2024: Mussa Dankwah justifies sample size for survey that puts Mahama ahead of Bawumia

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The Executive Director of Global InfoAnalytics Mussa Dankwah has explained how his outfit arrived at the sample size it used in conducting their recent survey on the 2024 presidential poll.

He says the sample size is purely derived by Mathematics and not by anyone’s imagination, the reason he is calling on those undermining the credibility of his work to put it to scrutiny.

According to him, research methodologies, “whether it is rigorous or not doesn’t lie in the opinion of somebody.”

He has been explaining to Alfred Ocansey on the KeyPoints on TV3 Saturday, April 13, 2024, how they arrived by the sample size with the voting population of the country in perspective.

“The sample size they are talking about is not done by somebody’s imagination or somebody’s wishful thinking. It is driven by the mathematical formula. It is mathematics. If you are saying we have 18.5 million people in Ghana who could vote, and that you want to do a survey of this population and you want to have 99% confidence level of the survey you are going to embark on and you choose a margin of error of 1.6%, the result of the sample size we need to engage is 6,128. It is Mathematics, you can prove it or disprove it. Nobody can tell you that this will not give you this result,” he detailed.

He called on those criticizing his methodology to put it to scrutiny to confirm or deny, if he adopted the right approach.

“Whether it is rigorous or not doesn’t lie in the opinion of somebody. But if you display and put out the methodology out there, every researcher who has done research can go through the methodology and either confirm or deny that this approach is not rigorous enough,” he said.

His comments come on the back of the poll which saw the ruling party’s candidate, Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia, trailing the opposition candidate, John Dramani Mahama, making the opposition suggest the survey was not rigorous enough.

The survey showed “the ruling party’s candidate, Dr Mahamudu Bawumia (DMB) trailing the main opposition candidate, John Dramani Mahama (JDM) in the race to lead the country in 2025. The poll shows JDM leads with 54.3%, DMB, 34.9%, Alan Kwadwo Kyeremanten (AKK), 7.5%, Nana Kwame Bediako, 2.3%, others, 1%.”

Reacting to the report on Accra-based JoyNews, Director of Communications for the NPP, Richard Ahiagbah indicated that “the value that we place on the outcome of this survey cannot be inclusive to the people of this country because the instrument itself can create problems due to people’s understanding of the questions asked.

“So, therefore the answers they are giving, as to whether or not they are answering the question about the country moving in the right direction (which is relative when you translate into another language) is the issue. For me, the premium we should put on this should not be too high.”