Survey of U.S. Home Growers Published. Claims include, "Women make up 61% of cannabis home growers."

[BII]

Any top-level data related to traffic and how much info. AFN pumps out? Such as gigs/month data transfer, how many 'hits' or pages are displayed monthly?

 

[Olderfart]

This doesn't take any account for the scale of grow size though.

It's ranking someone with one or 2 plants with someone who has a dozen or more.

If you are referring to the ILGM report, I am curious where I missed the definition of the grows included. Perhaps you could point that out for me, I would appreciate it.

 

[Olderfart]

Tangent alert: Since political polls were mentioned:

I think that they are not realy used to predict winners. They can however influence voters/ consumers with carefully crafted questions. (Until I mentioned it you probably weren't thinking of steaming hot chicken pot pie)

They are often used by marketing companies and political parties to find out what the public wants them to say during their campaign.

Note that it's not what they will actually do. They want to know what the public wants to hear so their leaders know what bs to spew out.

Now I want chicken pot pie...

Exactly why I rarely participate, and why I strategically lie if the biases indicate exactly what you describe. When the pollsters play obvious silly bugger with me, I sometimes do my best to screw up the poll.

Best stop there or I will get whacked for politics...

 

[Olderfart]

Why overcomplicate it?

What's stopping us from simply posing the questions ourselves? We actually have a form software add-on on the forum that would allow us to custom detail any type of survey we want to create. There are also loads of free software available like Google Forms, or free/relatively low cost services like MailChimp to do e-mail surveys for example.

I already told you the AFN model doesn't really fit 501(c)(3) model.

The problem is, assuming that you have confined the task to AFN members, is how then do you sample them, and how do you compensate for differing levels of "contactability" in drawing your conclusions. If the survey requires response (as opposed to simply mining activity data), any conclusions will have to be tailored to correct for non response bias - for example, perhaps members who are no longer active, cannot be contacted, or do not respond are different, as in have not grown weed in years. Again, this comes back to definition of population (is it all members, or not?), and how do you sample them (sampling includes dealing with, among other things non response bias, which in the case of AFN could be huge). Even just dealing with AFN, a truly representative survey would be a significant design and execution challenge.

 

[BII]

This doesn't take any account for the scale of grow size though.

It's ranking someone with one or 2 plants with someone who has a dozen or more.

Weighting/ranking survey responses by no. of plants/grow is itself potentially very biasing. In many respects, a grower is a grower, an AFN member is a member, etc. no matter how much they consume/spend or produce, whether they make a living or not off their grows, etc. There could be dozens of plants with SOG or just a few or even 1 big plant in a tent. [Rather than no. of plants, do you really want to rank/weight by yields, how much is produced/grow?]

Other than say if seek to target responses from growers with bigger budgets, why is no. of plants important enough to give weight to this, with your comment suggesting you'd want the whole survey weighted by no. of plants/grow? Many if not most surveys will be more concerned with people, their views, demographics, etc. with grow-relate consumption and production among the data points likely to be collected..

 

[Son of Hobbes]

How do you guys feel about polling versus surveys?

Polling is like the quick, down-and-dirty version of a survey, meant for faster response but less detail. And something that has been relatively common to AFN in the past (compared to a full fledged survey.)