Received: by alpheratz.cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk id JAA14029 (8.6.9/5.3[ref pg@gmsl.co.uk] for cpm.aca.mmu.ac.uk from fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk); Wed, 20 Feb 2002 09:10:48 GMT From: <dgatherer@talk21.com> X-Mailer: talk21 v1.24 - http://talk21.btopenworld.com To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk X-Talk21Ref: none Date: Wed, 20 Feb 2002 08:58:29 GMT+00:00 Subject: Re: an odd addition to the axis of evil Message-Id: <20020220090520.CDUK13137.wmpmta02-app.mail-store.com@wmpmtavirtual> Sender: fmb-majordomo@mmu.ac.uk Precedence: bulk Reply-To: memetics@mmu.ac.uk
If the original list of countries offered was only 4...
I assume this since the figures were:
Syria 32%
France 41%
Libya 7%
That leaves 20% unnaccounted for. As there were no undecideds, (I assume), the 20% could be for another (4th) country.
That means that the a priori chance of selecting France was 25% and the question is, how much of a deviation was 41% if the choice was at random?
In these situations, if the choice is random there will be a normal distribution with standard deviation sqrt(p(1-p)/n), which means that for more than 26 respondents, a figure of 41% is outside 2 st. devs of the mean. It is therefore unlikely to have been a result of random choice, and France is chosen with a statistical significance of p < 0.05.
This depends on there being only 4 choices. With more than 4, the a priori likelihood of France being chosen drops away from 25%, and 41% becomes even more significant. With more than 26 respondents (how many people read that newspaper??), again st dev will shrink and 41% becomes more significant.
All in all it's statistically unlikely France was chosen by accident resulting from random picking of a country, providing more than 26 people were in the survey.
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