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Re: Loop Survey - Summary - post scriptum to eben



Hmmm...you're right, I certainly don't want to enter the raw data
manually (but thanks for the offer). For future reference, I used
QuestionPro as a survey site in the past and was able to download the
raw data for free under some 1-time only student trial version. I
don't remember if it was a hassle to sign up for the student version
or not, but beware - if you use them they'll send you emails for
years.

I'm not certain I understand your question about years of looping
experience, although you may be asking why there are more people in
the middle amount of years and less on the extremes, which is how
almost all data looks when you take a survey (there is an average with
most people in the middle, and less people are further away from
average). This would be the same as if you asked people how tall they
are, but I'm not sure this is what you are talking about anyway.

I did take a look at the data from the 2005 survey since it has raw
data. Unfortunately, there is no easy way to look at looping devices
any differently because of the way it is set up (perhaps a hundred or
so variables, and I think it would be problematic to combine them, let
alone take a while). Besides, the analysis you did was plenty good
enough for that. I was able to look at a couple of things though that
I found fairly interesting and isn't covered by the good work you
already did:

I think most interesting is that the respondents from Looper's Delight
are definitely older than the responders from Harmony Central. We
can't be sure exactly how much older, since the question was a range
of ages (e.g., 35 - 40, 41 - 50, etc.), and the ranges were not all
equal, but if we pretend that the middle of those ranges represents
the people in that range well, which it may or may not, then the
Looper's Delight respondents were on average 10 years older. It is
very unlikely that this estimate is very accurate, the real number
could be significantly higher or lower, but the probability of finding
this age difference randomly is something like 2 in a ten million,
which again is misleading because of the age ranges, but still is a
number that doesn't turn up that often in survey research like this.
So we can be pretty certain that the Looper's Delight crowd is older,
and to a large extent is does look like the whole age curve really is
higher, and not better explained by just a ton of infants in HC or a
ton of geriatrics in LD. We don't know if this is a dead on accurate
representation of EVERYONE on this mailing list (in 2005), or everyone
on Harmony Central, but now that you think about it, doesn't it seem
like there are a lot of reviews on Harmony Central written by some 12
year old who just got a guitar for Christmas? This data would support
that.

Similarly, and supporting this age difference, is that Looper's
Delight respondents definitely have more years of looping experience,
averaging roughly 9 years for LP to 4 for HC, so more than double the
years of experience on average. This also has a VERY low probability
of being a random finding. This number is also much more reliable than
the age one because years of looping experience was not answered in a
range.

LP also has a larger proportion of Western Europeans (and lower from
USA) than does HC. The numbers on this would be misleading, but we can
be fairly confident then that the Looper's Delight community (in 2005,
of those who respond to surveys) is generally more international, a
bit older, and more experienced.

There could be many more caveats due to the methods, but no more than
in most or all survey research, so I feel pretty good about these
interpretations.

Eben



On 10/1/07, Rainer Thelonius Balthasar Straschill <rs@moinlabs.de> wrote:
> btw, there's one analysis you could do even without having the raw data:
>
> with the data you already have from my published info regarding looping
> experiences in the bins, could you do an analaysis how many people per 
>year
> have been coming in during the last 25 years to give us this results.
> Obviously, this is an under-determined set of equations, but what is it?
> Obviously, only a few people in the first years, then two peaks in the
> middle and since a decline?
>
>         Rainer
>
>