Does it though? I’d think you’d probably want at a minimum, n = 100,000 to have any sort of representative sample. I don’t think it’s a stretch to surmise that there are at least, what…a hundred million anime fans in one capacity or another, worldwide? Anything much less than 0.1% of the actual population is susceptible to some major deviation from population-wide statistics.
The problem is that this assumes a perfectly normal distribution. There’s a possibility that anime fandom likely doesn’t follow a Gaussian distribution (dare I say it’s almost certainly not Gaussian, because anecdotally, people seem to either be neck deep into it, or are disgusted by it, with nary anything in between). If this is true, the above calculator doesn’t exactly work.
It’s been a while since I took statistics, but yes, I guess that is a binomial distribution. It does not influence the results in the way you are implying it does, though. The calculator does actually account for it (the Population Proportion input), and the sample size actually decreases the lower/higher your proportion is. My point was that a question like, “Do you watch anime weekly,” is not like a question like, “How many hours of anime do you watch in a week,” where you certainly couldn’t assume a normal distribution for the number of hours watched.
Don’t worry, survey models in competent surveys company are made by peoples competent in statistics.
The number of people needed to survey is something you can calculate.
FYI I dont know the reputation of americans survey companies, nor found a survey report, so we can’t really judge this except saying the articles should share the survey report
I mean, I would hope that a company that exists to survey people would be competent in said field. But as someone who has a diploma in maths, I’ll say that I do think four thousand people simply isn’t enough.
Does it though? I’d think you’d probably want at a minimum, n = 100,000 to have any sort of representative sample. I don’t think it’s a stretch to surmise that there are at least, what…a hundred million anime fans in one capacity or another, worldwide? Anything much less than 0.1% of the actual population is susceptible to some major deviation from population-wide statistics.
You don’t need a massive sample size for surveys to give meaningful information. Play around with this sample size calculator if you want to see what the margins of error are: https://www.calculator.net/sample-size-calculator.html?type=2&cl2=95&ss2=4000&pc2=5&ps2=500000000&x=Calculate
The problem is that this assumes a perfectly normal distribution. There’s a possibility that anime fandom likely doesn’t follow a Gaussian distribution (dare I say it’s almost certainly not Gaussian, because anecdotally, people seem to either be neck deep into it, or are disgusted by it, with nary anything in between). If this is true, the above calculator doesn’t exactly work.
Normal distribution with regards to what? “Do you watch anime weekly” is a binary question. There really isn’t a distribution associated with that.
Wouldn’t that be a binomial distribution then?
It’s been a while since I took statistics, but yes, I guess that is a binomial distribution. It does not influence the results in the way you are implying it does, though. The calculator does actually account for it (the Population Proportion input), and the sample size actually decreases the lower/higher your proportion is. My point was that a question like, “Do you watch anime weekly,” is not like a question like, “How many hours of anime do you watch in a week,” where you certainly couldn’t assume a normal distribution for the number of hours watched.
Yeah I didn’t look at the exact questions. My bad.
Don’t worry, survey models in competent surveys company are made by peoples competent in statistics.
The number of people needed to survey is something you can calculate.
FYI I dont know the reputation of americans survey companies, nor found a survey report, so we can’t really judge this except saying the articles should share the survey report
I mean, I would hope that a company that exists to survey people would be competent in said field. But as someone who has a diploma in maths, I’ll say that I do think four thousand people simply isn’t enough.