• phario@lemmy.ca
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    1 year ago

    As a scientist I briefly read the Twitter chain by the company with some description of their methodology.

    Honestly I didn’t really follow it and it’s hard to critique based on buzzwords and Tweets. The person who was posting it sounds like a businessman, throwing jargon and words rather than something coherent.

    Ultimately I think that people are surprised by figures like “50% of gamers are female”. It might be 30%, or it might be something else. Maybe asking the questions a certain way biases the responses a certain way.

    It’s hard to glean anything based on what I’ve seen. I don’t have any skin in this game, and I don’t care either way, but all I’ll say is that it’s hard to figure out the truth based on the information available.

    • Whirlybird
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      1 year ago

      Matt Piscatella is an NPD employee who regularly shares/comments on their monthly video game sales charts. He’s basically just talking about the survey his employer does.

      These things are “biased” in all sorts of ways, even in the way the data is collected. What if women are 80% more likely to answer phone surveys? 70% more likely to answer email surveys? That’s going to hugely change the results.

      While mathematically sure you might be able to use a sample size of 10k to extrapolate out, I don’t think you can in this instance.