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      12-27-2013, 06:31 AM   #91
US///M3
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Drives: 1973 Jensen Interceptor
Join Date: Oct 2011
Location: Shanghai, People's Republic of China

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Quote:
Originally Posted by SenorFunkyPants View Post
It depends on what you want to achieve....if its just a big number with not much value, then anyone who has heard of a failure should vote and lets see how high we can get it.
OTOH if want a result that you can use to try to predict the % failure rate then only the owners of a car that has had an engine failure should have voted.
Analogy: You want to get an idea how many of the population smoke...so you ask a random sample of people if they smoke and use the results to extrapolate to the entire population. You don't specifically invite known smokers into the sample. You don't ask the sample if they know of anyone who smokes and you definitely don't invite a tobacconists into the sample and ask him how many people he knows who smoke....unless of course you want skewed results for some particular reason.
I think you made it very clear you dont like this poll. Lol
Even polls conducted by professional pollsters have a margin of error.

Let's say about 2,900 members looked at this thread,I'm sure of the 2,900 a good number are previous owners, prospect buyers etc, and remove the 2 or 3 votes you dont think should be included.
Now let's assume we have a sample of 2,500 M3 owners that viewed this thread and 32 had an engine failure.
That's about 1.3% of engine failures...
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