
To learn more if you're a beginner, read Basic That tells you what happens if you don't use the recommended sample size, and how M.O.E and confidence level (that 95%) are related. Try changing your sample size and watch what happens to the alternate scenarios. Survey a sample of the population, you don't know that you've found the correctĪnswer, but you do know that there's a 95% chance that you're within the margin of Survey response to more than the margin of error away from the true answer. The remaining 5% of the time, or for 1 in 20 survey questions, you would expect the The people in your sample answered "Yes". Many times, then 95% of the time, your survey would find that between 45% and 55% of


If 50% of all the people in a population of 20000 people drink coffee in the morning,Īnd if you were repeat the survey of 377 people ("Did you drink coffee this morning?") See below under More information if this is If you don't know, use 50%, which gives the largest The sample is skewed highly one way or the other,the population probably Random sample from? The sample size doesn't change much for populations larger than 20,000.įor each question, what do you expect the results will be? If Higher confidence level requires a larger sample size. The true answer is the percentage you would get if you exhaustively interviewed everyone. The margin of error away from the true answer. In 20), the percentage of people who answer yes would be more than With aĬonfidence level of 95%, you would expect that for one of the questions (1 Suppose that you have 20 yes-no questions in your survey. The confidence level is the amount of uncertainty you can Lower margin of error requires a larger sample If 90% of respondents answer yes, while 10% answer no, you may be able to tolerate a larger amount of error than if the The margin of error is the amount of error that you can tolerate. Of the statistics and the underlying algorithm. Calculate a sample size or margin of error, with detailed interpretations
