Posted by Jack Boyd (167.206.58.39) on October 06, 1999 at 20:11:32:
and I am afraid we are missing an opportunity.
The opportunity is to provide data to the researchers.
We have discovered that there are researchers out there. Not very well funded and few and far between but there are some.
What if we went to these people and sought there help in developing the right questions to gather the right data.
I can't think of anything more useful that we could do as a group. We will never have political power unless we all move to some sparsely populated county in Montana ( not being pejorative about Montana - great state - just not a lot of people per square mile )and then we could only influence some two-bit county commissioner. There simply aren't enough of us.
But there are enough of us to develop the most meaningful cluster demographics ever.
Let me preempt the anal retentives among us who are gong to talk about diagnosis and sampling size.
1)Clusters are always self-diagnosed. If you sent everyone of us to the Mayo clinic the diagnosis would still be based on an interview ( there is no blood test developed yet ) and if we could lie here we could lie there
2) sampling is a very, very powerful tool and if it is done correctly , relatively small sizes can be very predictive of large populations. The Internet as the source does not necessarily disqualify our data - the internet is too pervasive.( per the Jack Boyd school of statistics )
Our survey results are fine but I would suspect the reseachers would have an entirely differnt approach.
I have just taken it upon myself to contact the researchers.
What do you think?