Having been expelled from the Society, it could be argued that I have an axe
to grind BUT it seems extraordinary to claim that only 350 members need to
be surveyed to get an accuracy of +/- 5% and then to survey 2000.  Could it
be that 1,650 members can be statistically expected to bin their document;
or, perish the thought, the ''random" sample might not be so random after
all?

Bill
----- Original Message -----
From: "Simon Spooner" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Tuesday, January 27, 2004 5:10 PM
Subject: Re: Ignore if you are not a member of SOCAP


> All,
>
> I have received a response from SOCAP re the survey:
>
> "This survey of the membership is something that the Society carries out
> every few years to ascertain the views of members on the services that the
> Society offers.
>
> As with any market research, we only used a sample of the membership, 2000
> to be exact, ensuring that we covered the whole of the UK geographically.
> The reason that we did not survey the whole membership is that
> statistically, you only need to survey 350 people to ensure an accuracy of
> response of +/- 5%.
>
> Therefore we know that all the information we get back represents the
views
> of around 95% of the membership.
>
> Therefore, it is not only time consuming to survey the whole membership,
but
> also very costly with very little advantage.
>
> Obviously, there may be people who were not part of the survey that wished
> to make their views known, but there is no reason members cannot write to
us
> separately if they have a particular view.
>
> I hope this answers your question. "
>
> I will be asking questions around sampling strategy etc.  and how they
> arrived at those figures above because we all know that 75% of stats are
> made up on the spot ;-) Anybody know about power analysis for
questionnaire
> based research- closed questions and rank answered questions? What is the
> total membership of SOCAP?
>
> Best wishes,
> Simon
>
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