this post was submitted on 24 Jan 2024
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Anime

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Anime is hand-drawn and computer animation originating from Japan.

Anime; the one thing that gets us closer to each other and brings us together.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago (2 children)

Does it though? I'd think you'd probably want at a minimum, n = 100,000 to have any sort of representative sample. I don't think it's a stretch to surmise that there are at least, what...a hundred million anime fans in one capacity or another, worldwide? Anything much less than 0.1% of the actual population is susceptible to some major deviation from population-wide statistics.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago (1 children)

You don't need a massive sample size for surveys to give meaningful information. Play around with this sample size calculator if you want to see what the margins of error are: https://www.calculator.net/sample-size-calculator.html?type=2&cl2=95&ss2=4000&pc2=5&ps2=500000000&x=Calculate

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago (1 children)

The problem is that this assumes a perfectly normal distribution. There's a possibility that anime fandom likely doesn't follow a Gaussian distribution (dare I say it's almost certainly not Gaussian, because anecdotally, people seem to either be neck deep into it, or are disgusted by it, with nary anything in between). If this is true, the above calculator doesn't exactly work.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Normal distribution with regards to what? "Do you watch anime weekly" is a binary question. There really isn't a distribution associated with that.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Wouldn't that be a binomial distribution then?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago (1 children)

It's been a while since I took statistics, but yes, I guess that is a binomial distribution. It does not influence the results in the way you are implying it does, though. The calculator does actually account for it (the Population Proportion input), and the sample size actually decreases the lower/higher your proportion is. My point was that a question like, "Do you watch anime weekly," is not like a question like, "How many hours of anime do you watch in a week," where you certainly couldn't assume a normal distribution for the number of hours watched.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago

Yeah I didn't look at the exact questions. My bad.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Don't worry, survey models in competent surveys company are made by peoples competent in statistics.
The number of people needed to survey is something you can calculate.
FYI I dont know the reputation of americans survey companies, nor found a survey report, so we can't really judge this except saying the articles should share the survey report

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago

I mean, I would hope that a company that exists to survey people would be competent in said field. But as someone who has a diploma in maths, I'll say that I do think four thousand people simply isn't enough.