3 ms·

How is that clickbait BS? People sometimes poll an entire country by taking a sample of 500 people. 500 people gives you an error margin of +/- 4.5% (Variance

by FabHK 5y ago

How is that clickbait BS? People sometimes poll an entire country by taking a sample of 500 people. 500 people gives you an error margin of +/- 4.5% (Variance of a binomial is npq=np(1-p), worst case p=1/2, so n/4, std deviation thus sqrt(n)/2, then take 2 std dev to cover 95%, thus sqrt(n), as a percentage of all responses sqrt(n)/n = 100/sqrt(n)%), which is not amazing, but not BS either. Is nobody aware of basic statistics?

perl4ever 5y ago
I don't think the comment you are responding to is dismissing it based on the absolute number of responses, but because of the poor response rate. When you have a really poor response rate, don't you worry about how it might have biased your sample? People talked about this a lot with respect to political polling by phone during the last US Presidential election. Very few people answer phone polls these days and figuring out how different they are from the general population is important.
juped 5y ago
No one is aware of basic statistics. You see this comment on every poll which samples under a million responses (so every poll).
nostrademons 5y ago
It's a non-random sample. You can draw valid statistical conclusions from a surprisingly small random sample. You can draw bullshit conclusions from a surprisingly large non-random sample.
dekhn 5y ago
you just assumed a random sampling. these sorts of studies are literally the farthest you can get from random sampling- a bunch of uni students at a single uni in a single region. Many of us went through study size calculations when we were first learning how to run clinical trials (well, probalby not many, but everybody in my cohort did). The general conclusion among quantitative scientists is that social science like this is worse than useless because of how much time you have to spend explaining to people that the world is not a simple uniform random sampling.

by FabHK 5y ago

perl4ever 5y ago

I don't think the comment you are responding to is dismissing it based on the absolute number of responses, but because of the poor response rate. When you have a really poor response rate, don't you worry about how it might have biased your sample? People talked about this a lot with respect to political polling by phone during the last US Presidential election. Very few people answer phone polls these days and figuring out how different they are from the general population is important.

juped 5y ago

No one is aware of basic statistics. You see this comment on every poll which samples under a million responses (so every poll).

nostrademons 5y ago

It's a non-random sample. You can draw valid statistical conclusions from a surprisingly small random sample. You can draw bullshit conclusions from a surprisingly large non-random sample.

dekhn 5y ago

you just assumed a random sampling. these sorts of studies are literally the farthest you can get from random sampling- a bunch of uni students at a single uni in a single region. Many of us went through study size calculations when we were first learning how to run clinical trials (well, probalby not many, but everybody in my cohort did). The general conclusion among quantitative scientists is that social science like this is worse than useless because of how much time you have to spend explaining to people that the world is not a simple uniform random sampling.