I am not a statistician, nor do I play one on TV, but I I am considering hiring a research analyst who has submitted some examples of work performed. It involves reporting on market survey data.
The work seems mostly OK, but a few oddities make me wonder... For example, when reporting on the statistic accuracy of a sample of 500, a 'confidence' of 95% is given with a 'Std. Error' +/- 2.0%. I'm not used to seeing a Standard Error given in this context. Usually it's a margin of error, which a non-statistically-inclined client can intuitively apply to their data for confidence limits (which at 95% confidence level, would be larger than +/- 2%). The impression given is that one can trust the various results to be within 2% of the population value. Am I misunderstanding something here? Later, the sample is split into two sub-groups of n= 350 and 150 respectively. Results for a particular question are 56% and 68%. It seems to me that the sample is not big enough to declare these subgroups different, at 95%. No? Doug H ================================================================= Instructions for joining and leaving this list, remarks about the problem of INAPPROPRIATE MESSAGES, and archives are available at: ................... http://jse.stat.ncsu.edu/ ................... =================================================================
