Vernon, how many people do you think Gallup interviews when they do the
polls for the Presidential elections.
Hint: You do not need a very large sample to have pretty accurate results
even if the population is very large.
No, but you do need to sample very carefully and have a very good
understanding of the characteristics of the population you're sampling.
Pollsters doesn't just interview the first 1000 people that the guy with
the clipboard can detain. The sample they use will often have been selected
from a larger sample based on models of the population demographic. And/or
they weight the numbers got from the respondents based on their population
models.
A *very small* sample arbitrarily (or randomly) chosen is not generally
useful.
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