In: Statistics and Probability
Cosmopolitan magazine (Cosmo as it's popularly known) publishes many of it's well-known quizzes on its Web site. One quiz is titled "Are You Obsessed with Appearances?" Consider whether you want to use the quiz data to determine how obsessed women are with their appearance.(1) Describe the typical person who might respond to this quiz.(2) Indicate the danger of relying on volunteer samples in general.
Now out of the whole wide world full of people, only a tiny fraction must read the Cosmopolitan magazine, and out of that tiny fraction of people, even a smaller amount of people will take that quiz. Also Cosmopolitan magazine, since 1965 has been classified as a woman's magazine and so its fair to assume that mostly woman would be reading it. So we would not ideally rely on the data provided by this particular quiz to to determine how obsessed women are with their appearance as it may not provide a truly diverse sample covering all woman belonging to different religions, income groups and ethnicity.
(1) The general trend of the people who would take this type of quiz would include women who are regular visitors of this website(again a small population as some woman would only prefer to read the magazine only) and this group may include teenage girls, cosmetic companies and women in the beauty industry, working women, men who would like to just take the poll for fun etc. But mostly this quiz should be taken by women who are in a younger age group(high school or college).
(2) The dangers on relying on volunteer samples in general is that it may not provide a truly diverse sample covering all woman belonging to different religions, income groups and ethnicity. Also men are excluded from this quiz mostly. So we are not able to capture a truly random sample, making the poll very biased towards a particular outcome. This is a type of selection error in which people self select themselves in the study, only those who are interested would apply leading to unreliable results which cannot be counted upon.
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