Quote Originally Posted by spinner1 View Post
It must be a serious concern or Wisconsin who is about as cheap as it comes is sending out surveys.
Quote Originally Posted by spinner1 View Post


All groups are being asked for their input. It hasn't happened in 20 years and the results will be eye opening.


will come back to this when the survey is over and the data is tallied up.
Lets examine the article you referenced to see if you are correct.

"The Department of Natural Resources mailed out surveys earlier this month to more than 800 randomly picked fishing license holders who had once been trout anglers but who had not bought a trout stamp that would allow them to fish for trout in Wisconsin's inland waters since 2008."

http://dnr.wi.gov/news/DNRNews_artic...up.asp?id=1947

With all due respect, all groups are NOT being asked for their input. It is a limited survey of 800 fishers compared to a total of 136,836 stamp buyers in 2008. And it is limited to those who did not buy stamps, so NONE of the 136,836 who DID buy licenses are being asked their opinion.

That is exactly the point I made in my first reply. They are not asking any of the new anglers or older anglers that have repurchased stamps why they bought stamps. So since they are ignoring over 136,000 anglers how can you say all groups are being surveyed?

I estimate the cost of 800 surveys at about $2.00 a survey for printing, mailing, and data logging is less that $2000.00 not counting the researchers time for analysis. If the survey can be read by an OCR, it is even cheaper. It is pretty cheap anyway. So big bucks are not being spent in my view. They are surveying about 1/3 of their data set of 2,268, and they will be lucky to get a return of 1/3 of the surveys or 10% of their total data set. Is 10% an adequate sample? I look forward to their statistical analysis as to the confidence level of their data.

There is almost always a form of sample bias as to who returns a voluntary survey. Usually those who have a complaint will return voluntary surveys so the return sample will probably be biased toward those who will have negative reasons why they stopped fishing. That's the way it goes.

Don't look at the statistical results of the surveys alone. Examine whether they did a probability analysis of their results to see how likely the results are to actually represent the views of their target group. So we look first at the validity of their results BEFORE we look at the results. I truly hope it is not a case of GIGO.