6 Size is not all that matters

Contributor: Shannon Ang
Date: 22 July 2019

In response to public surveys, it’s quite common to hear people make comments like “they asked only 1000 people, how accurate can it be?”. Of course, people tend to only say these things when the findings presented are incongruent with their perception of reality.

This case study looks at whether and how size makes a difference when we’re trying to understand survey results from samples of the population. My hope is for you (the reader) to realize that often, how the sample is drawn (and how we quantify uncertainty) is more important than the size of the sample.