<story><title>“Roughly one-third of students are in favor of banning controversial books”</title><url>https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1406255522475556869</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>FabHK</author><text>Ok, so this is being somewhat misunderstood here, I think. A few observations:&lt;p&gt;- The sentence pg quoted (&amp;quot;Roughly one-third of students are also in favor of banning controversial books from their university library.&amp;quot;) is verbatim from the study.&lt;p&gt;- However, this study must be seen in context. It was deliberately and openly &lt;i&gt;designed&lt;/i&gt; to detect anti-free-speech sentiment by looking at a specifically chosen probable &amp;quot;worst case&amp;quot;, namely social science students at a traditionally left leaning university in Germany (which houses the &amp;quot;Institut für Sozialforschung&amp;quot; that gave rise to the &amp;quot;Frankfurter Schule&amp;quot; (Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse) of critical theory, a predecessor of (among other things) CRT). That this is the case is revealed &lt;i&gt;right in the title&lt;/i&gt; of the study: &amp;quot;Is Free Speech in Danger on University Campus? Some Preliminary Evidence from a Most Likely Case&amp;quot;, and further emphasised in the text: &amp;quot;We are certainly not under the impression that our sample is representative of university students in general (or the wider public, for that matter). &lt;i&gt;On the contrary&lt;/i&gt;, we &lt;i&gt;purposefully&lt;/i&gt; consider the social science studentship at Frankfurt as a &lt;i&gt;most likely case&lt;/i&gt;.&amp;quot; (my emphasis).&lt;p&gt;- So, the study succeeded in detecting some moderately illiberal attitudes in a quarter or so of students at one deliberately chosen &amp;quot;worst case&amp;quot; faculty in Germany.&lt;p&gt;- All the hubbub here about the statistical limitations is overblown, n=501 is not bad for social science and gives a error margin of around 5%, which means the results stand unless there was massive sampling bias.</text></comment>
<story><title>“Roughly one-third of students are in favor of banning controversial books”</title><url>https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1406255522475556869</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>thayne</author><text>&amp;gt; The target population of our study are all current social science students at GoetheUniversity of Frankfurt&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; Participation was voluntary and incentivized with a lottery of three Amazon gift vouchers to the value of 50 euro each.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; However, the actual net response rate dropped from 14% to 7.5% when we consider only those who completed at least80% of the survey (n= 501), which is clearly poor and has to be kept in mind whendrawing conclusions from the data.&lt;p&gt;Not really a great sample. All participants are from a rather specific demographic, and a small sample size at that.</text></comment>