Sample Size Quotes

I have never had an interest in opinion polls. They are merely an indicator, that's all.

Statistics is the plural of anecdote.

I think the biggest problem in clinical trials is that they are underpowered. And that fundamentally, the studies are just too small.

Most entrepreneurs don't need as many customers as they think. A lot of people think 10 is too few for a sample. But if all 10 refused a product, why is that not enough? If you want 100, 1,000 or a million customers, you first have to get 10.

The value and utility of any experiment are determined by the fitness of the material to the purpose for which it is used, and thus in the case before us it cannot be immaterial what plants are subjected to experiment and in what manner such experiment is conducted.

It always cracks me up when program directors or music directors or companies will say, 'Well, we did research, and we interviewed 25 people in our focus group, and this is what they said.' And I'm like, 'I've talked to 25 people in two hours! I talk to 50, 60, 70 people a night! Five or six days a week!'

Sampling, statisticians have told us, is a much more effective way of getting a good census.

Everyone takes surveys. Whoever makes a statement about human behavior has engaged in a survey of some sort.

My job as a pollster is to understand what really matters.

If your experiment needs statistics, you ought to have done a better experiment.

Surveys give us a way of finding out what people across the country are thinking.

If you aren't taking a representative sample, you won't get a representative snapshot.

Every time I think that political analysts and writers will finally recognize that most of them don't understand much about political polls, they prove me wrong. They don't know how to read them; they don't understand the importance of cross tabs within a given poll, and they don't know how to analyze them.

I know that a lot of people love to say that polls are wrong or don't matter, and from time to time they are - it depends on who they are polling.

Designers simply can't afford to make dresses in 10 sizes for a sample.

These syllables, about 2,300 in number, were mixed together and then drawn out by chance and used to construct series of different lengths, several of which each time formed the material for a test.

If I want a hamburger, I'm going to have one. No 21-year-old should be worrying about whether she fits a sample size.

People will often take an interesting experimental study which has been done in the world, perhaps at small scale, and then it's touted as some big solution.

The opinions of a convenience sample... may not represent all users.

While the Environmental Genome Project does not seek to assign allele frequencies, we are aware of the importance of accurate allele frequency estimates for future epidemiologic studies and the large sample sizes such estimates will require.

We may not have a sample size larger than one, or we may not have unlimited resources - it's a TV show, and we generally turn these things around in about a week or so.

I definitely think the girls look too skinny now. I'm friends with models Helena Christensen and Linda Evangelista, and I remember Linda telling me that when she was a model in the nineties, a sample size was a 6 or an 8. Now a sample dress size is a 0 or a 2. That's pretty alarming. There's a lot of pressure on the models. It's not healthy. I can't even imagine what that's like.

Being insignificant statistically doesn't mean it's right or wrong. It just means you don't have enough data to show yes or no.

You can't depend on polls.

You can't just take and sample size a few hundred people and decide that what you think 200 - almost 200 million people are going to vote and go do. It's a complex country.