At a lunch meeting with a client, the CEO of Gossip Polls, Inc., was asked to determine America's favorite day of the week. Hundreds of Gossip employees across the U.S. started collecting data immediately, calling people at their residences. One hour later, the attitudes from 10,000 Americans, across all 50 states, were collected. A staff member called the CEO, still at her lunch meeting, to tell her the results of the poll: America's favorite day of the week is Monday. Given your text's discussion of inductive reasoning in science, we might suspect that the observations in this poll are not representative because
A) the participants were only asked one question for this poll.
B) the participants were not sufficiently geographically diverse.
C) the people who are home to answer the phone in the early afternoon are not an appropriate cross-section of the U.S. population.
D) everyone in America was not asked their opinion.

Question

Quizplus · Accepted Answer

The poll was conducted by calling people at their residences during the early afternoon, which may not represent an appropriate cross-section of the U.S. population. This introduces bias into the sample, potentially leading to results that are not representative of the population as a whole. Additionally, the fact that participants were only asked one question and that not everyone in America was asked their opinion also limit the generalizability of the results, but these are not as significant as the issue of biased sampling.

At a Lunch Meeting with a Client, the CEO of Gossip