Reply:

This was part of a thread that I picked up at Message 8320. Good discussion, Shannon, et al..

I'd like us to conceptually link the discussion to statistical interpretation. You guys are sharing personal experience. That's a valid and good measure, especially because in it experiencing it, you have a good qualitative picture of the whole situation. But it's hard to measure that kind of data in a way that summarizes the many factors involved. That's when we turn to quantitative attempts to measure and analyze on a much broader level than our own personal experience.

Then we have to find reasonable measures that will let us look at a much larger and statistically valid sample from which we can generalize our conclusions. We might consider going on with this discussion to figure out what we might ask of our friends to see how widely held our own personal conclusions are. Maybe we could include a sample of law enforcement people, of young people, like your son, and some in college, of parents, of experts on marijuana and its properties and long term effects. If we used in our sample people we know who led us to other people they thought would talk to us, that would be a snowball sample. Not random, and so we couldn't interpret our results as effectively pertaining to the population in general, but better than just one person's personal experience. Notice that you have already begun this process of snowballing by your threaded discussion on transform_dom. If we actually included people randomly in our investigation, then we could interpret our findings as valid for the whole population that the sample represented.

You're basically sharing your perceptions of what variables are significant in understanding the issue, and what your own appoach to measuring them has been. Thus, Shannon states that her son's sampling of marijuana greatly influenced her own attitude towards legalizing the drug. Hot clue. That's a variable you'd need to consider, the concern of the parent for the child's experimentationl jeanne
December 27, 2005

Message 6047:

I heard that also! I also heard that they were given a shoot to kill order for the looters!! What is that about? We don't even shoot our looters here, let alone victims of the hurricane who don't have any food or water to survive, because of our piss poor response to the disaster. It is really sad how many people have died as a result of the governments slow response. How about those who starved or were dehydrated? Their only hope was to loot the stores to get what they needed to survive, and troops were given an order to shoot to kill? What has the world come to? This is horrible! And they wonder why people were refusing to leave and shooting at them? Look at what they were putting them through? And then they expect them not to fight back?

Reply:

This is part of a thread I picked up at Message 6077. Again, by sharing perspectives and sharing the information you were each picking up on Katrina, you are collecting data, not data you can easily quantify, but data representing the many perspectives and concerns of our transform_dom community. jeanne
December 27, 2005