Comment by sph
3 years ago
The fact that the ranges aren't equal makes it pretty useless to parse, unless entered in a spreadsheet later, and I couldn't be bothered to do that.
There's no reason to have one category for the 5 years 16-20, and the most common age group of Internet savvy working age adults to be lumped in two 10 year "26-35" and "36-45" ranges.
Oh well. It's just for fun I guess.
My first programming job was at a survey place. Once some high paid survey writer flew in to get one out in a hurry. I was told to sit with him and build it while he designed it. Ever since then I've though about surveys differently. The level of thought that he put into not only each question, but every word. Considering how one question might influence another would cause a change in order, etc. Anyway, it was fascinating to see his thought process, compared to being handed the finished product like we normally saw.
Yeah, surveys done for actual reasons with skill are amazing.
Most surveys are not done with any such skill - they’re done to get the result desired.
Basically what every student in the social sciences learns.
Every introductory textbook on empirical methods has a chapter on surveys and questionnaire design, and there are also specialized books just on that.
Tech would sometimes really do well in listening to people outside its field.
There are real complexities in designing a survey right. As you say, it's a subject of multiple books and even PhD dissertations.
I worked for 4 years with a team of mainly social scientists (agricultural economists, rural development researchers, etc) for a huge EU project that included plenty of surveys for 6 locations in different countries/languages. The effort to design the necessary surveys right and in different languages/cultures really amazed me. Some of the teams even got (good) papers out of it. There are so many biases that you can have with the wrong questions, groupings or even question orders.
One example I remember is that while in Germany (Altmark region) you could go straight to the people and ask them about their use of policy programme money, what had worked and what hadn't. You could not do the same in Croatia or in Bulgaria (we had study sites in both places), but had to layout questions differently, to get useful answers.
I could understand smaller age ranges for younger folks because they’re developing at a more rapid pace.
For example 30-40 age range would group together people with relatively similar life experiences, but a 10-20 age range would not.
Sure, but this is a forum for entrepreneurs and software engineers, it does not target the world demographic.
To be honest, I don't understand what "they develop faster" means either. One year of age is objectively the same length whether you're 10 or 90. What has growth speed and brain development got to do with anything?
> To be honest, I don't understand what "they develop faster" means either.
Maybe there’s a better way of phrasing it, but I mean the rate of change is faster when you’re younger.
A 10yo will have very different preferences, life experiences, brain development, etc. compared to a 20yo (10y apart). Yet a 30yo and a 40yo (also 10y apart) will be fairly similar in these categories on average.
Because at 10yo the body and brain are changing more rapidly than they would be at middle age.
So if you were doing any kind of marketing or social science report based primarily on age, you’d typically want narrower age bands at lower age ranges and higher age bands at middle and older ages in order to create the most homogeneous groups.
> One year of age is objectively the same length whether you're 10 or 90.
A 20yo is 100% older than a 10yo. But a 90yo is only 12.5% older than an 80yo.
The older we get, the closer in age we become.
> this is a forum for entrepreneurs and software engineers
While the demographics certainly skew in that direction, one of the nice things about HN is that it's not just software people. While I certainly comment more on software-related matters because that's where my expertise is, the largest value I get out of HN is from non-software/IT stories and the comments on those.
So I would strongly disagree with "this is a forum for entrepreneurs and software engineers". I'd probably stop coming here if that was the case.
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26-35 is the most difference, I think. Very different stages of life for most people.
Makes sense for a height survey.
I posted this exact poll this week, with proper ranges, but deleted it when I saw that HN had re-organised the items seemingly at random (just as it must have done here as well).