• Aceticon@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      To add to your point with a very clear example: If I did a study to check the average age of people in a country where I mainly checked the age of people living in retirement homes, the margin of error would be huge even if I got the age from hundreds of thousands of people.

      In more general terms: there can be systemic errors due to methodology that no increasing of the number of samples will remove.

      • thepianistfroggollum@lemmynsfw.com
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        1 year ago

        Thank you, that’s an important point to make. There’s this belief that big samples are more relevant than small samples, but that is far from the truth.

        The methodology is what’s vital to the data’s significance.