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Quote by: PatrickHenry  But overall, would anyone contest that large majorities of US men and women had sex before marrying? |
No, that seems correct, although these provided figures are specious. But I think I sort of proved my own point that pedagogues and other people simply use pseudo-statistics to prove their claims. That is, I was previously talking about the corruption of Westerners based on this poll itself even while knowing that its conclusion was flawed due to its bias.
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Quote by: Chancellor Then, of course, there's the number of people sampled - 38,000 and the vast majority of them women. There are approximately 300,000,000 Americans, of which 38,000 is significantly less than one percent. Further, women only comprise about 51 percent of the American population while the study questioned 33,000 out of 38,000 (significantly more than 51 percent of the people questioned). Consider me stubborn, pig-headed or whatever but I refuse to accept the notion that sampling significantly less than one percent of the entire American population can produce valid information about 95 percent of the entire American population. Then, of course, one has to also take into consideration the percentage of the American population that is pre-pubescent or otherwise theoretically incapable of "pre-marital sex." |
Yes, you've listed other forms of bias present in this poll. One of the biggest mistakes made is having too small of a sample; you need a certain size for certain hypothesis tests. The more you have, the more reliable your results can be, although there comes a point when adding more to the sample won't significantly increase your reliability. Anyway, I think we can argue that this poll had too much bias and mistakes.