Is the Sample Size of a Poll Important?
You see it all the time on social media. Someone’s doing a poll and they add on “RT for a bigger sample size/more accuracy” at the end of it. Someone else argues with an opinion poll because “they only asked 1,000 people and no one I know has ever been itterviewed”. Finally, someone explains that while they might have only asked a few people for their research report, it’s still a bigger ratio than polling companies manage for the whole country, so therefore it must be accurate.
And in response to all three examples, people who actually understand how statistics and polling work wince at seeing an idea being so badly misunderstood.
Now, I appreciate on a surface level that opinion polling and surveying can seem like they’re just guesswork. The idea that you could ask a thousand or so people and get a broadly accurate picture of the way the nation from questioning them does seem absurd on its own. If you can tell the views of millions from a sample of a thousand, then why not a hundred, or ten, or even just one, if you could find the right person to represent the nation as a whole?
This misses that the important part about sampling is that it’s not just grabbing a thousand or so people, asking them their opinions and then totalling them up at the end. It’s not just any sample, it’s one that’s both random and representative.
