Quote:
Originally Posted by Indy Coug
Where is the experimental design?
How was the survey administered?
What questions were asked?
How was the weighting of each question determined?
What kind of survey stratification was used (income, geography, ethnicity, age, sex, etc etc)?
What was the margin of error?
How many responses were available (eg. yes/no, agree/neutral/disagree, etc etc etc).
What was the sample size of St. Kitts versus the US?
How much variability is there in individual response? Monday, someone might be pretty happy and then Tuesday really sucks and kind of mutes their outlook on life.
The reasons why qualitative studies are inherently less reliable than quantitative studies should be more than self-evident.
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Sorry, but your opinion is insufficient to make the argument --even in this forum-- that the study is flawed or erroneous.
I provided a link to the paper on the subject. It is also indicated on the site that one can email a request for more data. One of the links includes this text:
“The projection, which is to be published in a Psychtalk in March 2007, will be presented at a conference later in the year. Participants in the various studies were asked questions related to happiness and satisfaction with life. The meta-analysis is based on the findings of over 100 different studies around the world, which questioned 80,000 people worldwide. For this study data has also been analysed in relation to health, wealth and access to education.
Whilst collecting data on subjective well-being is not an exact science, the measures used are very reliable in predicting health and welfare outcomes. It can be argued that whilst these measures are not perfect they are the best we have so far, and these are the measures that politicians are talking of using to measure the relative performance of each country.”
Furthermore your credibility on the subject of qualitative vs quantitative data is hampered by your past arguments in support of Crowton.