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Dungeons & Dragons has 15 Million Players in NA Alone; Storyline Is "The Da Vinci Code meets Gangs o
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<blockquote data-quote="Jay Verkuilen" data-source="post: 7745294" data-attributes="member: 6873517"><p>You are engaging in a false dichotomy. In fact, a city isn't a simple known population, and this one isn't an entirely unknown population. In fact there are ways to determine population sizes if you want to know that, for instance <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_and_recapture" target="_blank">capture-recapture methods</a>, which don't actually require ear tags or leg bands to make work. The reality is that early questions in the survey are used to filter out people who are ineligible and shouldn't be counted. I'm sure there are a few people who slip in or get excluded, but even then there are methods to correct for this reasonably well. </p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>No survey will be perfect, but given some triangulating information it's quite possible to reality check it. A responsible survey analyst will do these things. There are also ways to check the response rates against hard(er) numbers, such as sales figures, return figures, numbers from the book trade vs game shop distributors vs online, etc. These are things that publishers check all the time. I know for fact that WotC can because they are distributed by Random House. </p><p></p><p>Now, there are ways they could be very, very wrong, typically when the sampling is flawed. For instance, their Unearthed Arcana weekly surveys were clearly quite flawed due to the fact that they were totally volunteer with no attempt at outreach beyond what was posted on their web page. So if WotC is trying to determine things like the numbers they report from surveys like that, it would be really bad. </p><p></p><p>As I said in another post, I don't know who WotC hired to do this work and it's possible they didn't do it properly. Certainly you can't count on WotC to be anything but self-flattering with their announcements. However, survey companies like Qualtrics and YouGov really do know what they're doing and the principles are pretty well understood. I took an <em>entire doctoral class</em> in grad school on the topic despite survey research not being my area. People get their PhDs on it and spend their entire career working in the area. These are precisely the people that Qualtrics and YouGov hire.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Jay Verkuilen, post: 7745294, member: 6873517"] You are engaging in a false dichotomy. In fact, a city isn't a simple known population, and this one isn't an entirely unknown population. In fact there are ways to determine population sizes if you want to know that, for instance [URL="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_and_recapture"]capture-recapture methods[/URL], which don't actually require ear tags or leg bands to make work. The reality is that early questions in the survey are used to filter out people who are ineligible and shouldn't be counted. I'm sure there are a few people who slip in or get excluded, but even then there are methods to correct for this reasonably well. No survey will be perfect, but given some triangulating information it's quite possible to reality check it. A responsible survey analyst will do these things. There are also ways to check the response rates against hard(er) numbers, such as sales figures, return figures, numbers from the book trade vs game shop distributors vs online, etc. These are things that publishers check all the time. I know for fact that WotC can because they are distributed by Random House. Now, there are ways they could be very, very wrong, typically when the sampling is flawed. For instance, their Unearthed Arcana weekly surveys were clearly quite flawed due to the fact that they were totally volunteer with no attempt at outreach beyond what was posted on their web page. So if WotC is trying to determine things like the numbers they report from surveys like that, it would be really bad. As I said in another post, I don't know who WotC hired to do this work and it's possible they didn't do it properly. Certainly you can't count on WotC to be anything but self-flattering with their announcements. However, survey companies like Qualtrics and YouGov really do know what they're doing and the principles are pretty well understood. I took an [I]entire doctoral class[/I] in grad school on the topic despite survey research not being my area. People get their PhDs on it and spend their entire career working in the area. These are precisely the people that Qualtrics and YouGov hire. [/QUOTE]
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