Originally Posted by Martin Crisp
yeah, I agree it is hard to capture everyones point of view perfectly, but hopefully the options I did post, provide some level of insight as to what people are thinking.
What they are thinking about what exactly? "Chemical use" or "foam tire vs Rubber tire". There have been countless threads where rubber vs foam was debated. I will promise you, that there were respondents to your poll that chose the very first selection based solely upon their desire to get rid of foam tires. And I'm not conviced that mistake is not at least partially to blame for response 1 being the most popular to date. Its pretty bad when the first 5 words on a poll selection list intended to determine peoples opinion's about using harmful traction compounds reads, "We should ban foam tires.."
As an analyst, I'm faced everyday with the challenge of collecting and analyzing data. I'm fully aware that increased options in polling is more likely to provide detailed and thus more representative views of the studied population, granted the sample size is large enough. You were right to provide more options than just "keep it" or "ban it". Your error came however when you riddled the options with an unrelated decision: Foam vs Rubber.
A-Ko's suggested choices would have yeilded a much more viable representation of the RC racers likely collective opinion.
And if you think that I'm being just a little too judgemental of a simple RC poll, think again. I've not even scratched the surface of all of the inherent nonsampling errors, won't pretend to think you care about all of the sampling errors, and I won't bore everyone else (more than I already have) with an explanation of how this poll is actually exponentially skewed by the latter causing numerous instances of the former.
Now don't get me wrong. I'm sure your intentions are great, regardless of how I feel about chemical use in RC. But lets not pretend that this poll proves anything specific or useful about the subject at hand. To be honest this issue isn't something that should be polled anyway. Its an issue of determining factual evidence of toxicity at common levels of exposure. Until that is done we are all debating something about which we have no clue.