Endurance.Net Ridecamp Archives

As someone who's done lots of polling in her profession, my  
impression is that those who stand to lose something respond in  
tremendous numbers to opinion polls, thereby skewing results.  The  
skewed results are in themselves valuable as they reflect the passion  
of a group--but they don't necessarily represent the whole group.   
I'm curious whether Mike can discover the weight divisions of those  
who voted.  In other words, did those who vote to retain weight  
divisions represent a cross-section of all the divisions, or did the  
voters represent one or two groups in particular? Mining the poll to  
determine the percentage of responders from each weight division  
would give a clear picture of exactly who cared enough to vote.

If it turns out a small group is over-represented in the voting, you  
might try randomly selecting 15 people or so from each weight  
division to poll.  Send them the poll directly, by mail (so you don't  
only get responders from internet users).  You may get somewhere  
around 80% or more returned surveys when using this sort of direct  
polling.  Then you might try selecting a proportionate number of  
people (another random selection with no redundancy allowed, i.e.,  
new people queried), so that you have a representative number from  
each weight division (e.g., if 50% of riders are LW's, then 50% of  
the responses tallied are from LW's).  Then, just to prevent tyranny  
of either the majority OR the minority, you could send the poll out  
to a completely random group of riders--with no regard to weight  
divisions at all.  In total you'd be sending out about a 225 requests  
for responses.  They could all be mailed at once.  I'd chip in  
personally for postage and volunteer hours to produce, mail, collect,  
and compile data because I find the whole thing so interesting!

Mary K.
(long-time rider, zero-time endurance rider, long-time pollster for  
non-profit groups)

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