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A suggestion re the current poll

Posted: Wed Dec 02, 2015 7:42 pm
by Fred588
First, allow me to say that I think polls have good entertainment value. They can, however, be quite misleading and for a variety of reasons for purposes beyond entertainment. For example, the current poll asks about preferences for peat versus clay. Simple enough! However, I believe we are seeing answers that relate to two different contexts. If I read it correctly, the original poll question was intended to be about preferences for personal sinking. Some of the answers are clearly about that but other answers make mention of the appearance of the "mud" substance and at least one explicitly mentions video scenes, which is an entirely different context.

In a research setting one would probably attempt to get around this issue by using two questions, such as "As a sinker I prefer..." and "As a viewer of videos I prefer..." or something similar.

So long as the poll is about entertainment my point here does not matter, but it does matter if we want to make any sort of inference from the result.