Survey Results Are In - Very Encouraging! A Little Statistical Background.

Over the last few weeks we have been trialing and tailoring our survey. I'd like to thank all the people who helped us by taking the survey. In the end we had a very good tool that participants praised as interesting and enjoyable.

Someday I'll tell you about our $49 lesson but right now I'll tell you of ALOFT's wonderful success.

First, a bit of statistical background. In order to make our survey results as generalizable to the public as we could we sought to have a stratified random sample. The factors we decided on were that we could accept a 5% error rate in the responses. Also we wanted a 95% confidence level, or only a 5% possibility that the results could be due to chance. We set our expected variance to require the maximum number of responses by setting it to 50% (as in equal chance a subject would pick one or the other). Then we wanted to generalize this to the population of the U.S.A. These mean that we would have a sample that would cover 304 Million (as of summer 2008) so we added many more and found we could cover the world's population with 385 subjects.

Then again we were only sampling people in the U.S.A. so we can really only generalize to the U.S.A. We went with the higher number to allow internally guided exclusion criteria and sampling methods to allow exclusion from certain aspects of the study based on background factors.

In the end we had 500 completed surveys with 87 partially completed or eliminated due to just randomly hitting the keyboard rather than answering. So, of the 500 we confirmed many of the intuitions we had had and learned several new and supportive things that we had been unable to quantify.

So far it is saying to us at ALOFT "keep going, this can be a very helpful and positive thing." We had several criteria for the study that would have indicated that we were on the wrong track, none of those were evident. We will be sharing different results from the study as we go along.

If you are interested in this data we are interested in sharing it with you in a meeting. We can setup online meetings if you would like to delve further into any results.

Look for our results in the coming days and weeks.

Yours,

Ed Kaine, OTR, RFT
Member and President of ALOFT

RegisteredFunctionalTherapist@gmail.com