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A comment on Poll: How old are you?. Parent comment

Re:Poll: How old are you? by durana on Sunday March 15, 2009 @03:38PM (#517149)
I couldn't find a figure on the number of registered HN users, so I used the recent number of daily unique IPs from http://ycombinator.com/newsnews.html. That number is 22,000.

For a confidence level of 95% with a confidence interval of 4%, we'd need 584 votes.

I'd imagine there's a lot of science to polling which this calculation probably ignores.

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Re:Poll: How old are you? by tokenadult on Sunday March 15, 2009 @09:10PM (#517547)
For a confidence level of 95% with a confidence interval of 4%, we'd need 584 votes.

I'd imagine there's a lot of science to polling which this calculation probably ignores.

Yep, everything about being sure we have an unbiased sample, which is not likely for a question like this.

What does your calculation say about the grouping of the data into categories?

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Re:Poll: How old are you? by durana on Monday March 16, 2009 @05:27PM (#518816)
I don't think the calculation says anything about the grouping of data. Or does it?

If you have an unbiased sample of 584 votes and 60% of the sample responded "25 - 30", could you say with 95% confidence that 60% (+/-4%) of the sampled population would select "25 - 30"?

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