Conversation

One thing that bothers me is when ppl critique my data as "unscientific" due to sampling bias. First, y'all better not look into a lot of what you think are "scientific" studies Second, there's nothing wrong with sampling bias if you acknowledge limitations and don't extrapolate.
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Yes, I know most of my responders are white cis men between 25-40 who are associated with STEM, vaguely liberal/centrist/libertarian. There's nothing about collecting data from a particular demographic that's unscientific as long as you're upfront about the demographic.
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This comes from an understanding of "science" I find a bit weird; science is not a mystical thing that descends upon your work once you've achieved perfectly random distribution of your sample. Science is just a process of figuring things out! There's lots of ways to do it!
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Just make sure you're upfront about your methodology, where you got your data from, the limitations of what can be directly extrapolated from that data, and try to get familiar with the easy ways you can accidentally misinterpret data despite good intent.
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