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A meta-review has found that Brown Daily Herald survey data is dramatically skewed towards people who have way too much time on their hands. The report casts doubt on the BDH’s polls, previously considered the authoritative window into student life at Brown University.
“We reviewed historical data collected by the BDH and discovered fundamental flaws in the data collection process,” researcher James Hinton explained. "Turns out, the BDH was only polling the bizarre outliers who would willfully waste their time filling out a two page survey for some random college publication. As a result, the responses have never been representative of the general student body.”
The review noted that the student surveyors would desperately try to solicit responses in library lobbies, outside the mailroom, and at the entrance to Faunce House. “Very few people in any of those locations would be so bored that they would deliberately suffer through questions about ‘getting off College Hill,’ or ‘meeting with professors,’” Hinton continued. “These anomalous cases made up the majority of the BDH’s horrifically biased sample.”
In their concluding remarks, the researchers noted that even the people with nothing better to do still didn’t have any opinion on UCS.
