Frequency Of Exclusion

There are some debates in society that can polarize a population. Rip families apart. End decades-long friendships. But even though these topics can be painful and inflammatory, they still need to be studied. And as a social scientist, we’ve decided to tackle the toughest of tough questions head-on:

Do pineapples belong on pizza?

Since we don’t want to ruin anyone’s family gatherings or anything by bringing up this question face-to-face, we’ve decided to conduct an email survey instead. We email everyone in our hometown who is over the age of 25 and solicit their input.

“But wait,” some might be saying, “what about people under the age of 25? Don’t their pizza preferences deserve a voice too?” In other words, what’s up with the high frequency of exclusion in our research? “Frequency of exclusion” refers to how often a certain segment of a population is excluded from a particular study; in this example, the frequency of exclusion of town residents under the age of 25 is 100%. They’re just not included at all.

Sometimes a high frequency of exclusion has no effect on the results of the study—maybe there is no statistical difference between the under-25 crowd and over-25 crowd when it comes to putting pineapples on pizza. But sometimes it can have a huge effect and can really skew results.

Like...let’s say a high school decides to ban high heels, and then only asks male students how they feel about said ban. Since male students tend to wear high heels less often than female students, and are thus less affected by the ban, the results of the study are probably not going to be a true indication of how the student population as a whole feels about the dress code changes.