billiethepoet:

leupagus: hellotailor: machotrouts: I’ve spent the past couple of days asking several hundred Grindr users in Edinburgh whether they believe Scotland should be an independent country. Replies were of variable quality. Here is a representative sample:













STATISTICS:

The number of people I’ve questioned who are still present in my Grindr message history – that is, excluding the many people who blocked me – appears to add up to 655. I’ve divided their reactions into…

NO: 114 YES: 101 Undecided: 24 Other opinion: 20 Indifference: 15 Evasion: 38 Bemusement: 13 Amusement: 2 Too horny to answer: 6 General rejection: 4 Did not respond: 318

So there you have it. When only decisive opinions are taken into account, Grindr votes NO to independence, with a 54-46% split. If this is reflected in the results of tomorrow’s referendum, we can assume the headless torsos have taken over Scotland and there’s nothing you can do to stop it.





(The eagerly anticipated machotrouts.tumblr.com endorsement goes to a YES vote. I am a headful torso.) Vital citizen journalism. By far the best thing I’ve seen in re: Scottish independence. This is, indeed, vital citizen journalism. I hope I someday work on a study where one of the answer categories is “Too horny to answer”

Okay, y'all, I’m not done with this. I just went on a screamy rant to Mr. Mac about how fucking awesome this is.

There are so many great things about this. The survey community is scratching its fucking head trying to figure out how to use social media and mobile devices to collect meaningful data, particularly how to gain a representative sample. Then this dude just tosses out a question (not a particularly well worded question but whatever) on a hookup app and gets the same spot on fucking percentages as pollsters are spending mad dough trying to measure.

People are being published in major methods journals with shittier info than this. Careers are built on less.

There are two major issues here though: response rates and sampling.

The response rate thing is really that we can’t count the number of dudes that blocked him, so we’ve got no accurate denominator for calculating a response rate. Lesson learned: use this method again, but make sure you take an accurate count of messages sent not just what’s left in your inbox when you’re done. If we ignore the blocked users issue, which there’s nothing else we can do about that right now so why not, his response rate is slightly over 50% and, of those respondents, about 80% gave him real, valuable data. That’s higher than you would expect from just a random web or mobile device survey. Like, way higher.

Sampling is even funnier. Obviously, this is a convenience sample and not generalizable blah blah blah. But he’s right on what the major polls are showing for this issue. So, a possible conclusion is that there is no substantive difference on this issue between the Scottish general population and dudes looking to hook up on Grindr. And that makes me cackle.

OP, seriously, write this shit up and try to get it published. A small, experimental methods blog or journal would jump on this if they knew what was good for them.