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Not to keep harping on this ... (Score:2)

by pudge (1) on 2007.10.16 22:49 (#58424) Homepage Journal

One of the things I'd like to emphasize is we don't know what slice of the actual Perl population the survey actually responded. We don't know the survey bias, we just know who responded.
Social science methodology tells us that this means your results have no meaning as applied to the "Perl community" as a whole. Or, as Wikipedia puts it [wikipedia.org], "Nonprobability sampling techniques cannot be used to infer from the sample to the general population."

That doesn't mean the study is completely useless, but it says nothing useful about the larger population, and since the goal is "to take a snapshot of the Perl world as it currently stands," the study doesn't seem to be capable of achieving that goal.

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