How is it that in the U.S.,surveys of 1,000 are accepted as representative of the entire country?

Question

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?

In: Other

Answer 1

The answer is statistical probability. It’s more important how representative the sample is of the population, IE is the average age, gender, geographical distribution etc representative of the country. It’s actually not relevant how big a percentage of the population it is when you’re talking about that big of a population. Polling 100,000 people isn’t likely to be any more accurate if the sample is equally representative.