andrewducker | It's how you ask the question that matters

No, you should assume that their views are lightly held, so that a small difference in phrasing will change them.

If their views are so lightly held that a change in phrasing with identical meaning causes them to change them then they are crazy. And stupid.

No, they are not insane, and they are not idiots. They are selfish and disinterested.

Clearly insane. Clearly idiots.

(How long do you think we can keep this up for? Think we can get anyone else to join in?)

Edited 2010-02-12 16:25 (UTC)

This comment makes no sense to me, sorry.

Well, we're both making blanket generalised assertions without anything to back them up, which strikes me as the least useful form of communication ever.

I mean, contradicting something I said without offering any reasoning wasn't going to change my mind, so I assume that it wasn't meant as an actual attempt to do so. Therefore I can only assume that you were doing it for fun, so I was joining in by contradicting you in return. I assumed we were engaging in something like the Monty Python "Argument" sketch.

You weren't being _serious_ were you???

Yes, I was perfectly serious. You don't really think that there is a case of mass insanity, and while you may think that there is a case of mass stupidity, I think that's a very patronising line to take. I consider your explanation a more extraordinary one than mine, and I consider replacing an extraordinary explaination with a less extraordinary explaination a perfectly reasonable thing to do, even without any evidence to follow that up. That is, you'll note, how general hypothesis-forming works; find the simplest, most likely thing.

Aaah. In which case I'd like to say that I wasn't making a diagnosis, nor was I attempting to deduce their actual levels of IQ, I was merely deing disparaging in my despair.

Which in a way, I was responding to as well. I think your despair is misplaced, and it's not as bad as you think!

I shall hope so. I'd rather people were just negligent than having completely incoherent mental models (see also comments below about the humanising effect I think that "gay man" might have on people's reactions).

Uninterested, surely. To be disinterested is a positive quality, akin to being impartial....

(Sorry to nitpick, but that one drives me up the wall)

Are they identical? If you believe that men should be able to serve and women shouldn't, then you'd answer no to the first and yes to the second, wouldn't you? Although I'd expect the figures to skew in the opposite direction based on that.

How big was the answering sample? If there were 100 people in each then it could be simple differences of opinion that only average out as the sample size increases massively.

The national telephone poll was conducted with 1,084 adults Feb. 5-10 and has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus four percentage points for each half sample. Complete poll results and article will be available this evening at www.nytimes.com.

I am a long way from convinced that 1000 people from a population of 100 million is significant to analyse closely. It is only 0.001% of the population or put another way less than five times the number of people reading this post I guess.

I don't see how the population size it's taken from has any bearing on it.

What we're interested in is the chances of them producing such a differential through sheer chance - which will be staggeringly low for a sample size that high.

But that's my point it isn't a high sample size for the population it alleges to represent. Especially if that was half of the 1000 asked each question. Taking the accepted errors into account the difference can be accounted for by only 40 people. What I'm unsure of is if that also allows for wilful 'wrong answers '

Anyway this sample is too small to be more than curious enough to merit further sampling, and it certainly doesn't merit wild accusations of stupidity or insanity on its own.

Sample size is only really all that important if you are wedded to a Fisherian notion of significance. Or in short I think you ay perhaps be arguing at cross purposes with yourself as your overall point seems to be that the result may not be substantively significant (glancing at the numbers I suspect it is a significant result with an impressive power I'd check but am at work and can't really sit in front of SPSS crunching numbers).

Assuming proper randomization then I reckon the power of this sample if probably enough to make generalisations about the wider population.

Dependent on the geographical area sampled of course. Although studies of relatively low sample sizes can be used to make all sorts of valid wider generalisations depending on the statistical tests used.

I'm not entirely clear what you mean by willfully incorrect answers?

Although I agree that the result doesn't merit wild accussations of stupidity or insanity. All it shows is that "homosexual" is a far more loaded term then gay men or lesbians. Or that there was some systematic bias in the way the questions were asigned to participants.

If you get a chance with SPSS I'd appreciate it - meantime thanks!

Fisherian what? I have no idea what you are talking about, but I know enough real human people to know that extrapolating 500 to 100 million simply does not convince.
So how am I arguing against myself when I say that it I don't see it as definitive but it is a curiosity to look deeper at.

Wilful wrong answers refers to something I read about how any survey contains a small proportion of respondents who deliberately give answers opposite to what they think is expected. All I wondered was is this where the 4% +/- error comes from?

Well the 4% error rate will cover things like that I imagine.

Fisherian statistics and significance is essentially what you are talking about - or classical statistics if you prefer. In that the higher your sample number the better chance you have of detecting a signal from noise in terms of inference.

Also where does the 100 million number come from? The population of America is just under 400 million and the population of NY state is 19 million.

The raw data doesn't tell us much and extrapolating that makes little sense. However using inferential stats. we could see how likely it is these distribitions are seen within the wider population.

500 to 100 million is not nessecarily that unconvincing.

This table illustrates the sample sizes you need from a given population for certain margins of error.

http://research-advisors.com/tools/SampleSize.htm

100 million was a conservative estimate of the adult population of the USA as I read this survey as referring to the country rather than the state.
I'm just naturally sceptical about broad statements based on minimal data, and its easy to say its not unconvincing but why isn't it? Why is a sample of less than 0.001% really comparable to the whole?
Maybe I just don't get it, but that extrapolating 500 to 100 million just seems like the claims that are made for homeopathy.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sample_size
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_large_numbers
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_limit_theorem

If there are holes in the mathematical reasoning contained in these articles, then kindly point them out. If not, then accept that one of the things that mathematics is for is to override your instincts when your gut feeling about (e.g.) the necessary sample size is dead wrong.

Thanks, I do accept the maths, but I query the absolute interpretation of the results. The maths is counter intuitive to me, which makes me say that rather than take this set of results as definitive (which seems to be the case here) the response might be better to take the results as an indicator worthy of repeat testing. In other words combining math and gut feeling.
Does that make sense?
Of course there is a possibility that this is what happened but it has not been reported that way.

I think there are two things here:
1) Whether this scales up to much larger numbers, assuming that the population is similar - and from my understanding it does this pretty well.

2) Whether this would scale across the entire US - and on that we lack sufficient data, because people in Texas would not answer the same was as people in New York, and the differences are large enough for that to be a major factor, so scaling it in that way would be inappropriate.

And in any case, for this kind of research you want to do it at least twice, to prove that the findings are replicable and to make sure someone didn't do something stupid the first time.

Not known for my writing skills, so I hope I get this lot across o.k.

My experience is from corporate sampling.. where the confidence is closer to 98 - 99 percent.. I believe the recognised confidence in public survey is 95%

The error rate goes down as the sample goes up.. The fact this is, and it IS a low sample rate is taken account by the error rate of 4% - which for a sample of 5-600 is about right..

so, rather than the percentages, let’s have a quick look at the actual figures..

1054 people were called.. that’s the ones that weren't busy and took the call.. and as many folks have pointed out that better be a representation of all states, and all backgrounds.. I assume not talking into account most serving armed forces, their phones just aren’t useful at the moment in Afghanistan, nor criminals.. nor anyone that works high up in most organisations, as their PA's would have taken that call..

Total yes % no % Yes # No #
gay & lesbians 542 60 40 325.2 216.8
homosexuals 542 44 56 238.48 303.52

so if that distorts when i post, 325 v's 238

when you take the 4% into account, you get a bunch of thresholds...

-4% +4%
gay & lesbians 303.52 346.88
homosexuals 216.8 260.16

what to look for here is the distance from the upper of one to the lower of the other.. if they overlap, the error is making the statistics show the same thing..

in this case the gap is around 43 people. which is 0.039667897

or 4% ( nothing to do with the error, if your not following )

remember that 95%..

"Wilful wrong" as it has been put here, isn't covering the 4% error it's the confidence I touched upon at the beginning.. ( although not something I had heard it called before, but from pigeonhed's description of whet it was when he read about it..

In my world, Its 99%, and the remaining 1% I call the "people that want to get fired" in the public world, i guess a better descriptive are tossers.. with a few that just didn't understand I'll let them off and more to the point, that’s a deficiency in the survey.

therefore the confidence percentage wipes out 54.2 peoples answers...

meaning our difference of 43 people can be looked at with a bit of statistical scepticism...

I know I am at the upper ends of all the threasholds, but if asking a few thousand more people would make it so I can't complain, then I'll belive the statistics. More to the point, if you belive the statistics as they stand, then follows that my statistics are just as valid..

For me.. I have to agree with pretty much all of what pigeonhed has said..

Is it significant, that’s what Andrew originally asked.. I think yes.. and are they stupid, I have agree, yes.. but are the statistics sound.. No.. not convinced.. up the sample rate to closer to 2k, and the error would drop, and it would blow my sums out of the water..

Erm... 'statistics are like bikinis'.

No, they're really not.

You don't know the quotation or you disagree with it?

I know of several similar ones, so I could work out the rest :->

And yes, I disagree :->

Which is _yes_ you can twist statistics, because so many people don't understand them, so they can't tell when you're fucking with them, but they aren't intrinsically meaningless.

If you don't trust statistics, you should, I imagine, avoid all modern medicine that isn't intuitively obvious.

Got a headache, a rash, an aversion to light and a neck you can't bend without pain? Sticking a needle in your spine hardly seems intuitive. Sure, the statistics say you might well have meningitis, but they're meaningless...

Semiotics. They're interesting and important. No, two apparently equivalent words do not, in real world terms, mean the same thing.

Of course not - "gay man" includes the word "man", which has a humanising effect on the people you're talking to, priming them to respond in a more empathic manner towards the subject you're asking them about.

I still despair though.

Above certainly wasn't meant to imply that you didn't already know that, of course!

There are vast applications of semiotics to all sorts of humanities fields. F'rex, the semiotics of academic gender studies jargon are virtually guaranteed to get them exactly the audience, positive and negative, that they indeed gain.

Yup - when people use in-group language with out-groups and expect the same reaction then both sides tend to get a nasty shock.

Of course, for some groups (fundementalist religions, for example) this is a feature, not a bug.

Oh, and I don't mind people assuming I don't know stuff - my knowledge of semiotics comes almost entirely from a copy of "semiotics for beginners" that I picked up a few years back. Same with critical theory and postmodernism :->

Hey, I might have peer-reviewed a semiotics journal, but that's not to say I have any formal knowledge of the subject either...

Also, "homosexual" draws attention to the act of sex more than "gay men and lesbians" does.

That's what I came here to say. The phrasing of the first question was humanising.

It is still depressing, though, that people's opinions are so easily manipulated. Not to mention a but worrying.

Well, the fast-in-fast-out of a poll is the ideal forum to show dramatic results.

What worries me is that the various gay activism groups haven't done such thorough research that this is old news. Control the dialogue, people.

Absolutely. It's not rocket science - I was probably about five when I realised the manipulative power of "It is, isn't it?" versus "It isn't, is it?" Which is remarkably effective despite being about as subtle as a hammerblow.

I saw something in the BPS digest, suggesting how you frame something can change a person's thought processes toward it. I think we all make (unconscious) associations and the word "homosexuals" might be triggering to some people but "gay men and lesbians" don't seem to hold the same impact.

http://bps-research-digest.blogspot.com/2010/02/how-framing-affects-our-thought.html

Ah, I see you're already discussing that kind of angle with cairmen :)

Always nice to have you commenting though!

I know, but I hate commenting the obvious unless I have something interesting to add :)

Isn't that one of the founding concepts used in CBT? That how you frame something strongly affects how you think about it?

"68% think we spend too much on foreign aid. 59% think it should be cut"

(Yeah, the semiotics comments are more relevant, but this is funnier!)

On a similar note, there was a recent poll put together by The Metro (owned by The Mail), which said "We spend X amount on foreign aid - is this enough?"

Because most people said "Yes" they led with a headline of "We're spending enough - stop now!". If most people had answered no then they could have led with "We're not spending enough! Spend more!" and either way round the government looks bad...

Then you get headlines like "Is Andrew Ducker Corrupt?" or even "Andrew Ducker Not Corrupt, Claims Government Spokesman", which immediately make people think Andrew Ducker is corrupt even if it has never previously crossed their minds.

I'm sure you're not corrupt, btw.

Well, not _very_.

I have to admit that, having just re-read those headlines, I'm having my doubts.

It's how you ask the question that matters

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

Arh, the clasic six sigma question

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject