Queer @ Work

[differenceblog]

Gay men and women have many challenges in the workplace. Some are similar; some are different. Chung and Harmon (1994) suggest that gay men are more likely to be interested in traditionally feminine careers than straight men, although they found that masculinity/femininity was not a predictor (as determined by BSRI). Adams et al (2005) did not

Comments

[randomguy3]

That's not really the same. In a deterministic system, you (in theory) only need a sample of one. People are not deterministic, though, except as part of a large population.

Statistics tell you something about the population, not about an individual. Sure, you can get a probability of something being true of a particular person, but that assumes that you fix a certain number of attributes and randomly select a person from everyone having those attributes.

There are things called confidence intervals. Usually you want a 95% confidence interval. If a statistic is true with a 95% confidence interval, that basically says that in 95% of the populations the sample could have been take from (remember - you know nothing about the population you haven't sampled), the statistic will be true. [Caveat: this may be slightly incorrect if I am misremembering my A-level stats]. You need a large sample (both in real terms and in comparison to your population) to get that.

One of my teachers once told me: you want an error of less than the square root of two. To get that, you need a sample of about 2000. So don't trust any survey that had fewer than 2000 participants.