Jamie wrote:AAFitz wrote:in your 16 years of education, did you ever learn that taking a poll the way you did without a random sample of a population tells you absolutely nothing
if you try to pin the average personality of this site based on the people in these forums, your data will be so skewed so as not to be informative of anything....there are lets say 8000 active players...how many post in here...
the average player in here, does not use this forum, except occasionally, and my guess is the percentage that post frequently does not break 5-10%
and of those, the more eccentric players are probably doing the posting which means they will not be representative of the main body of the population anyways
the average player does not have time for such things, so thier opinions are complete absent from any poll and therefore any poll cannot be accurate to represent the CC community....
the only thing any poll can ever show about this site is what the percentage of some of the people that frequent the forum think about a subject
without a random sample, you can never assume what the people in here think by any poll taken, because the sample size is so small, and so not representative of the general population, that it is completely impossible for it to describe the general population
The same can be said of the other websites i have frequented, but it is what i have to work with. I can't make people respond to my post. I tried to make the post inflammatory enough to get a maximum amount of responses, and I wanted to continue another week or two, but wicked has warned me twice now, and I tried to tell her I was conducting research, but I was still warned, so on this site, i had to end all this earlier than I had planned. The data I have collected isn't definitive, but it does seem to indicate that a high percentage of people on this WARGAMES website have particularly aggressive, and hateful thoughts. Far more than on other websites. I'll bet my data is more accuarate than the data used to show Bush has a 36% approval rating. How do they know that?? There are over 200 million people in this country of voting age, and I doubt they got the opinions of even 1% of those 200 million. I'll bet i have gotten a higher percentage of responses from CC members, than the government got from the American public for their approval ratings. I'm sure if I had told people what i was doing, I would have gotten more responses, but they would have been biased. I wanted to invoke real raw emotion in people to get genuine results. It got to a point, that no matter what i posted, people would respond with hatred, and venom. Some post never meant to be inflammatory at all, recieved such treatment. They made me laugh. cause they weren't even part of my research. Once you learn to hate somebody, it doesn't matter what they say or do, they are wrong for it.
the polls on bush are taken from a random sample of the population and does have a standard deviation...it is not 100% accurate
they are not taken from an internet site asking people for their opinions...the reason being, on average the most biased people would answer...also...people are 27 times more likely to complain about a product they dislike than post about a positive experience....this translates to volunteer polls....the sheer act of asking for volunteers to come to you renders it useless, except to tell what percentage of the volunteers think....you cannot extrapilate it to the general population because it is not representative of the general population....
it only tells you what the percentage of people who would respond to an inflamitory poll might think....since the average population would not waste their time with it, their opinions are for the most part completely absent from your poll
do not tell your professor that your poll is as accurate as the polls about bush or he may very well laugh directly at you....how you were even able to type that out i have no idea...
