[Sampling] Why you should never ever use the word “representative” about survey sampling
We often hear the term “representative”, which supposedly assesses the quality of a sample. In this article, I’ll try to show you that not only “representative” has no scientific meaning, but also it is misleading, especially for people who are not survey sampling specialists. This includes students, researchers in social science who use surveys, journalists, etc. I hope I’ll convince you to never use it again ! I’ll try to make this post understandable even if you don’t know the…