Hayden, from the blog "Hanging with Hayden," directly sent an email to her reader's age 18 to 21 and asked the survey question, "If you had the chance, would you want to be president?" Of the 1,200 readers to whom she sent an email, 567 responded, and 35% of those who responded said no. What does this show?

Select one:

a. No meaningful conclusion is possible without knowing something more about the characteristics of Hayden's readers.

b. The survey would have been more meaningful if Hayden had picked a random sample of the readers who responded.

c. The survey would have been more meaningful if Hayden had used a control group.

d. This was a legitimate sample, drawn randomly from her readers, and is of adequate size to allow the conclusion that most of Hayden's readers do not want to be the president.

e. The survey is meaningless because of nonresponse bias.

You need to know your population before carrying out your survey. For instance, if you want to survey all men who attend a local church service on Sundays in a month, you need to determine the size of that whole population.

Next is to determine your margin error or confidence interval. How sure do you want to be that your responses will represent the survey population? The commonly accepted confidence interval is 5% for standard surveys, 10% is acceptable but not higher than 10%.

Then pick your confidence level which has to do with how accurately your population is represented by your sample. A confidence level of 95% is standard for surveys, you may go up but not lower than 90%

You also need to consider your sample size. You need to know how many responses do you need to get back for an accurate survey? This is should not be mistaken for the number of people who take the survey, they are not the same. It’s how many you need to get returned.

You may have to do some guesswork to get your estimate response rate. You need to make a good estimate in order to decide how many surveys you need to send. A standard response rate would be between 10-15%. You can expect a higher response rate if you are offering an incentive for completing the survey/

Finally, do some calculations to determine your survey group. To know how many people you should send your survey to, divide the sample size by the response rate. For instance, if you have a sample of 2,000 and an estimated response rate of 10%, you would divide 2000 by .10. Your survey group should be around 20,000. Also, note that your response rate may affect the number of people you need to send your survey to.

If your response rate is higher, you might not need to ask as many people to complete your survey.

The correct answer is A. No meaningful conclusion is possible without knowing something more about the characteristics of Hayden's readers.