Everyday, Facebook, my social network of choice, puts up an interesting poll of some sort. I’ve made it a habit to check each day what interesting question will be posed, and what answers their sample of 1,000 participants gives. Today’s poll was so interesting, I just had to post some commentary on it.
Is global warming a problem?
Yes, most definitely. (73%) – 731 people.
Maybe/Not sure (13%) – 134 people.
No. Not at all. (14%) – 135 people.
First of all, I think that the poll needs a much larger sample size. Facebook has a huge audience to draw from, from many different demographics. 1,000 people is good, but wouldn’t 10,000 be much better? If they were to present a few polls to me daily, I’d do them quickly and move on with my routine. I’m fairly confident others would agree; post your thoughts in the comments. However, 1,000 people is good enough to see some trends in the breakdown by demographic. Look at the results for this poll on facebook, or on a mirror I made.
Next, there are two quick trends I can see there. First, the ladies are obviously answering more intelligently. That’s a personal opinion, granted, so I’ll rephrase. On this poll, females answered more toward the side that global warming is a problem, in comparison to their male counterparts. Second, there’s a slight relationship between age and answer. Apparently, a higher percentage of 25-49 year old participants thought that global warming is a problem in comparison to their juniors. However, there’s a huge problem there: sample size, again. There were only 29 participants aged between 35-49! That might not seem bad, until it’s considered that there were 497 participants in the age group 18-24. I’d love to see an adjusted sample here.
There are two disappointments here. I’m slightly disappointed in the number of people who think that global warming, which I prefer to call climate change, is a problem. Only 73%? We can do better. More importantly, I think their implementation of polling and statistics is flawed. It’s a great idea, but the sample needs to be larger, and the breakdown of responses needs to be more intelligent. For example, how about adding geographic location as a reported statistic? I’m very interested to see how many people from, for example, the deep south think that global warming is a problem in comparison to people in Silicon Valley. Lastly, I’m confused as to why the graphs for “Answer Breakdown by Sex” and “Answer Breakdown by Age” need a upper limit of 102%, rather than 100%.
If you haven’t seen it yet, see Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth.
I’m not sure that making the sample size larger would even out the age discrepancy. I think it just reflects the composition of Facebook’s user base. Facebook doesn’t have a page with stats of all users, does it? Because that would be fascinating.
Anyway, agree that more people should join that 73%, although it is an incredible margin, considering how divisive politics are these days. The people I’m really worried about/mad at are the 134 Maybes. Fence-sitters!
I doubt Facebook gives out that information, about its users. That would be amazing though.
Also, I don’t think that making the sample size larger would even out the age discrepancy as much as it would make the age breakdown more useful. Saying that 83% of participants aged between 35 and 49 said that global warming is definitely a problem is great until you remember that there were only 29 people in that group polled. If 83% of 290 people said that, I’d be much more impressed.