I’ve noticed most U.S. polls query around 1,000 people and sometimes even less. Somehow that qualifies for headlines like “Americans say…” or “Most Americans…” How is it acceptable that 0.0002% of the population is accepted as representative?
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I’m not sure how to explain this in a way that a 5 year old would understand, but I’m a statistics major so this is up my alley.
Basically, there was a guy who worked for a beer company under the pseudonym “student” and he developed a table of numbers called a Student’s T Table which allows statisticians such as poll workers to make broader estimates of a larger population from a small randomized sample. He developed it so that he could test small samples of beer for quality without testing the entire batch.
The numbers generally work to some degree because most data follows what’s called a “normal distribution.” You’ve probably heard of this referred to as a “bell curve.” It’s essentially a random distribution of numbers that form around an average value in the center. Because most data follows this trend, we can estimate the population normal distribution (with a pre-determined level of confidence) relatively accurately from the normal distribution of a small random sample of that population.
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