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You should look up polling theory. You don't need to talk to every member of a population, only a representative sample.
by CydeWeys 7y ago
You should look up polling theory. You don't need to talk to every member of a population, only a representative sample.
- keiferski 7y agoTherein lies the rub. Determining a representative sample is far more complex than most pollsters would like to admit.
- eru 7y agoThe simplest way I found to explain that the representative sample size is independent of population is via coin flips and dice: We can flip a coin an infinite number of times. But to get a good handle on whether it's biased or not, we only need to sample a very finite number of flips.
- jve 7y agoMy point was that sample size is too small. According to Standard Occupational Classification [https://www.bls.gov/soc/ https://www.bls.gov/soc/] there are 459 broad occupations. Multiply that by age group and you still haven't tossed a coin even a single time for every combination of occupation/age group.
- bart_spoon 7y agoAnd OP's point is that you don't necessarily need to have representation for all of those occupation/age group combinations. It's highly unlikely there isn't high amount of overlap in perception among those occupations. There's going to be supersets of those occupations that are fairly homogenous. So you really don't need a huge sample of respondents and coverage of all of those possibilities. You just need the makeup of the sample to be reasonably representative, and that's the problem with this poll. Seems like it was conducted in a way that the respondents are not representative.