When people say things such as 80% of marijuana purchases are on the black market, how are they getting data for this?
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The data comes from a lot of different places, many of which have been mentioned here already – polls/surveys, federal data, law-enforcement data, etc. All of that data is then aggregated, meaning that it’s cleaned up and linked together in one data set.
I think the logical next question would be, “Well, how can you trust it”, and that would be fair. The data is only really ever as good as the people who are collecting it. If they have rigorous standards, good methods, and care about what they’re doing, the data could be very accurate. If they’re less meticulous, it might *not* be so good. Furthermore, there are a lot of factors that are unavoidable that make your samples less generalizable, meaning you are less able to say that your results are true for everyone, as opposed to a specific population. The obvious example is that it’s difficult to get facts/opinions from all the unique groups of people that exist in the United States for one single study, let alone all our data. There’s a reason we don’t take census every year. Phone surveys are inherently biased towards people who have phones, and cannot represent people who do not have phones. Lots of quirky stuff with data collection.
At the end of the day, data is always just a “best guess”. If we want to nitpick, we could find problems with all data – no question. Some data is good, some data is not as good, but all data is just an estimation that was gathered and interpreted by people, to the best of their abilities.
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