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This headline should have read: 2% of Japanese self-report living as recluses And there is no link to the actual report, which I can't seem to find anywhere. I

This headline should have read: 2% of Japanese self-report living as recluses And there is no link to the actual report, which I can't seem to find anywhere. I wanted to know if they had some definition or threshold of reclusiveness that was needed to be considered 'hikikomori', or if they just asked people if they self-identified as hikikomori with no definition. In any public opinion survey, a response that is only 2% is nothing, it is outside of the margin of error.

bigbillheck 4y ago
> outside of the margin of error Margins of error for binomials only really work in the center of the distribution, of which 0.02 is pretty far away from. Also the survey size was 30000 people, which means the error bars should be well under 2%.
- contravariant 4y ago
  We can be a bit more specific. Towards the extremes a binomial distribution gets a variance close to the mean (it basically becomes a Poisson distribution). So that would be a variance of around 600 in this case. All in all a standard deviation of about 0.1 percentage points. This is only a rough estimate but it should give the right order of magnitude.
- kmod 4y ago
  There was a post on here maybe a few months ago (couldn't find it right now) about how a certain percentage of people will just answer polls randomly/adversarially/jokingly, and I think the number they gave was something like 7% (I think they ran a poll with one nonsense answer and 7% of people picked it, something like that). Anyway that was just one data point, and I'm sure there are cross-cultural differences, but I think the idea still stands that there is an absolute margin of error in polling that is independent of the true percentage and sample size.