Author Topic: The Donald Trump Thread  (Read 150275 times)

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Offline cybercoma

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Re: The Donald Trump Thread
« Reply #7155 on: March 05, 2021, 12:33:02 pm »
MH,

That's the thing--the study wasn't about the general populace. It was trying to understand a very specific population: MAGA Supporters. Researchers sometimes struggle with ways to gain access to populations in order to study them. The fact that MAGA Supporters footprints could be sniffed out of Facebook and the way these researchers did it was pretty interesting.

I have some experience with using Facebook Ads to find research populations and it never ceases to amaze me how much information people leave about themselves.

Granted there are certain limitations to all of this. For instance, you'll miss some people because not all MAGA folks have Facebook. However, if the people missed are randomly distributed and don't share any particular qualities that are related to the reason they're missing from Facebook then it's easily controlled for in their sampling (see for example how they had to oversample for women). The stuff they presented in this study, however, is all just descriptive statistics of the sample they created from Facebook. Interesting enough. Does it speak for ALL MAGA supporters? Seems likely unless you can come up with a compelling reason to believe that those excluded would have such radically different opinions that it would change these descriptives.
« Last Edit: March 05, 2021, 12:35:35 pm by cybercoma »