Rich Ulrich wrote:
> Personally, I'm used to seeing 'margin of error' written and
> described very poorly or ambiguously, mainly in newspaper
> articles, where it is impossible to tell what it refers to. Unless
> the numbers are there so I can do the math.
In reporting survey results to the public, if there is more than one result
reported, the single, so-called, margin of error, is usually the width of the
95% confidence interval for the sample proportion 0.5. Since, for a given
sample size, any other sample proportion will have a narrower confidence
interval, the so-called margin of error is conservative.
-Jay
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