http://www.opendemocracy.net/blog/dliberation/representativeness_response Comments for "Representativeness: a response, " en http://www.opendemocracy.net/blog/dliberation/representativeness_response <p> James Clive Mathews has <a href="/blog/dliberation/full_results_representatitveness_comparison">taken issue with the representativeness of the sample</a>. In response to his query, we released the time 1 opinions of the 3,500. Our policy is never to do so prior to a Deliberative Poll because publishing poll results may influence the deliberation. But afterwards there is no harm. The time 1 results are just another poll. <br /> <br /> The only way to compare statistically the answers to questions is to compare the means. But means put on a 0 to 1 scale are incomprehensible to journalists and the public so we released percentage breakdowns instead.<br /> <br /> Mathews has conducted his comparison by picking out parts of questions (in fact, parts of one selected question only). When we compared the means for all the questions between the 3,500 and the 362, we found that the substantive differences were only 4% of what they could possibly have been. Even a cursory comparison of the answers will show that the differences are mostly small between the 3,500 and the 362. </p>&nbsp;<a href="http://www.opendemocracy.net/blog/dliberation/representativeness_response" class="read-more" title="Read the rest of this posting.">Read the rest of this post...</a><p><a href="http://www.opendemocracy.net/blog/dliberation/representativeness_response">read more</a></p> http://www.opendemocracy.net/blog/dliberation/representativeness_response#comment Academic debate dLiberation James Fishkin The Poll Tue, 30 Oct 2007 23:04:04 +0000 James Fishkin 34983 at http://www.opendemocracy.net