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Your never going to have a completely random test. Your randomness comes from you picking for an area and the people who chose to do the test. Saying otherwise
by DeonPenny 7y ago
Your never going to have a completely random test. Your randomness comes from you picking for an area and the people who chose to do the test. Saying otherwise is being pedantic to your detriment.
- Retric 7y agoIt’s normal to randomly sample multiple locations. Random samples from even 10 random locations are much more useful.
- umanwizard 7y agoNot really... more data can't fix sampling bias.
- Retric 7y agoIt’s not a question of ‘more data’ as I could take 50 or 50,000 samples from a single person and I gain nothing about the overall population. Similarly if I sample 50 or 50,000 people from a single city I learn nothing about people outside of that city. But, by sampling N random locations I at worst have N samples to work with. PS: At the extreme, if I sample every single member of a population then ‘more data’ solved any bias problems. Smaller samples are subject to a wider range of biases.
- DeonPenny 7y agoNot if you are trying to figure out the best decision for a specific city/state
- umanwizard 7y agoYou can choose to offer people some incentive to take the test. If you offered $50 per person you would probably eliminate most sampling bias.
- Waterluvian 7y agoYou're more likely to attract people of lower incomes, which we already suspect are more vulnerable to Covid given the kinds of jobs they have.
- oefrha 7y ago> Your never going to have a completely random test. You are not, but on the full spectrum of somewhat random selection methods, talking to people on the street is about as biased as you can get.