tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1625076107995960519.post3732073089428266179..comments2024-01-26T03:40:32.465-05:00Comments on Breath of the Beast: Are Liberals Less Liberal As Media Consumers?Yaacov Ben Moshehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16711165551258127500noreply@blogger.comBlogger5125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1625076107995960519.post-9352066986365442142007-12-05T13:04:00.000-05:002007-12-05T13:04:00.000-05:00Yaacov, the 5% you refer to is a level of confiden...Yaacov, the 5% you refer to is a level of confidence, not necessarily the percentage difference. Let me explain. If you toss a coin 10 times you may get something like 6 heads and 4 tails a 20% difference. Statistically significant? Not at all. However, with a much larger sample, say 10,000 tosses you will get nearly a 50/50 split and you can be sure at a 95% level of confidence that your results are not due to "chance." <BR/><BR/>The 95% level of confidence simply states that if you run the same experiment 100 times, you should get the same results 95 times or more. <BR/><BR/><A HREF="http://gmroper.mu.nu" REL="nofollow">GM's Corner</A>Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1625076107995960519.post-66106628637658339212007-12-03T21:23:00.000-05:002007-12-03T21:23:00.000-05:00Welcome, Anonymous and congrats! You are obviously...Welcome, Anonymous and congrats! You are obviously one of the open minded ones.Yaacov Ben Moshehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16711165551258127500noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1625076107995960519.post-71779183594812918582007-12-03T16:46:00.000-05:002007-12-03T16:46:00.000-05:00Not totally true. I am a liberal, and I read your ...Not totally true. I am a liberal, and I read your post. :-)Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1625076107995960519.post-25570238048007597542007-12-03T13:59:00.000-05:002007-12-03T13:59:00.000-05:00J.O., my friend, let me see if I can set your blan...J.O., my friend, let me see if I can set your blanket on fire- or at least dry it out a little.<BR/><BR/>I don’t want to get too deeply into this debate because, as I said in the post, there are a lot of methodological loose ends here anyway. But I will insist that there is good reason to pay attention and pursue more information. <BR/><BR/>Actually, in social science research any difference over 5 percent between two segments of a population will generally turn out to be “statistically significant (i.e. attributable to a real, quantifiable difference in behavior). The difference here is huge. <BR/><BR/>As for your analysis of the real meaning of the statistical difference, the example you pose is somewhat misleading. The number of media contacts per subject is much lower than 12 or 14 per subject. Actually, one method of computing the difference Note too that there are a lot more Liberals in the sample. I have tried (in the privacy of my own home- because without the original data base all of these machinations could turn out to be illusory) actually puts the high end of the “media per subject” statistic at about 1.3 and the low end (for the Liberals) at somewhat less than 1 (about .6). <BR/><BR/>We have to remember that we are talking about individual human beings and that a group that is averaging .6 main sources of information is a pretty uninformed group. That means that for everyone that reads a newspaper and watches the news on TV there is a someone who may be catching the back end of the national news as they tune in to find out if Britney is REALLY pregnant. My guess would be that there are, in that group, a great many of the ignorant followers of “popular opinion” whose progenitors have made up the lynch mobs, good Germans, docile sheep and guillotine watchers of human history. <BR/><BR/>Whatever the percentage, the general belief is that more information is better than less but if they are signing on to the Daily Kos and counting it as a main source of information, maybe not…Yaacov Ben Moshehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16711165551258127500noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1625076107995960519.post-34607008082163457322007-12-03T12:30:00.000-05:002007-12-03T12:30:00.000-05:00Not to be a wet-blanket, but...OK, let's say "we" ...Not to be a wet-blanket, but...OK, let's say "we" use 16.955% more sources than "them." This is much closer to 1/6th (16.666) than 1/5th (20%), right?<BR/><BR/>So in practical terms, if all you know about 2 people was that one subscribed to 12 magazines, while one subscribed to 14...is that really significant? Wd we really assume one is inferior to the other?<BR/><BR/>To me, what jumps out from this survey is the uniformity of the results...269 at the top, 230 at the bottom, I'd say those differences are insignificant in practical terms.Jewish Odysseushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/16704379332151214452noreply@blogger.com