Calling the mathematically competent...

[ScummyMummy]

Can someone tell me how to work out ratio please?

what exactly are you trying to do?

in what way?

what do you need to know specifically?

do you mean if out of 30 people 20 are men and 10 are women so the ratio of men to women is 20:10 or 2:1

264 is total number of posts on my various threads on different websites asking for people to complete my questionnaire

82 is the number of completed questionnaires

I want to work out the average number of posts needed to get one completed questionnaire

I think

Is it ratio I mean?

You want a percentage succes rate then don't you? Is that what you're after?

Every 3.3 posts resulted in a completed questionnaire.

Not sure because I wasn't asking specific people who said yes or no so can't do percentage?

Cool! How do you work that out then? Is it like percentage?

or 31% success rate. I think but am no statistician!

WWW is correct.

To work it out scummymummy, you just divide the total number of posts by the number of responses you got.

264 posts resulted in 82 completions so 264 divided by 82 = 3.2 rounded down, sorry, not 3.3

but better wait for someone better on stats to agree, I could be totally wrong!

and 31% of 264 = 82

To do your percentage it's 82/264 X 100 = 31%

i thought this was a maths thread but I see now that it is Chinese

OK! That's easy enough! Thanks very much WWW and GDG.

I'm explaining to the potentially uninitiated marker of my dissertation that it's hard work keeping topics bumped for long enough to get people to see them and that you need to do this to get questionnaires back. Do you think ratio is the best way express this, btw? I def don't want to use the term "percentage success rate" because that implies that every post is a potential questionnaire sent out, iyswim, whereas they actually most "non questionnaire" posts represent a bump from me or a chat breaking out on the thread. (Plus a 31% return rate is pants!)

lol jools!

I feel I'm explaining badly!
Possible posts are

• completed questionnaires from respondents
• bumps from me to keep threads hot
• questions/chat from other posters

Took a lot of the 2nd two to achieve more of the first, basically.

Can't you just explain that then Scums? That it took effort? What are you trying to get across? That is wasn't scientific? That it was hard? That people chat on threads about Serious Matters? That you had to musmnet to get your work done?

I'm trying to say that getting completed questionnaires back is hard work, even online, yes!

It is a man marking it so I thought a mathematical thingy alongside my explanation and my barchart (in not too garish colours) of "Total posts to completed questionnaire breakdown, by website" might convince him more...

If you want to demonstrate that it's usual could you reference some study on the subject? And hopefully, show that the response rate you got was better?

anything here, it references a lot of studies

here is better but is pop ups so may be no good

Thanks hon- will have a look at those. I have some books on inernet research methodology but posting on forums is a relatively unexplored area, afaics.

I'm astonished to find that maths is actually quite interesting sometimes! Am doing mean, median, mode and range for my data atm and it's rather fascinating. Wanted to share revelatory feeling of enthusiasm with you all. Did all you mathematically competent ones know that maths had a certain something wonderful already?

I'm not really mathematically competent, I just know that you can show what you want to show using statistics (lies, damned lies and statistics etc), it's an important part of my job Glad you're finding it interesting!

Yes- it's amazing how different it all looks depending on what you do with the numbers isn't it? Opportunities for twisting everything to say exactly what I want are far greater than i had realised.[evil] Though obv I will remain true to my lovely respondents and not do that bad unethical thing more than strictly necessary [only slightly tarnished halo].

SHIT. Have just lost almost my entire morning's work apart from the maths due to perfect stupidity on my own part. Somehow replaced the new version with the old version by following the save prompts at the end of the word session. grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr. And partner is saying "You must remember to save!' in most irritating fashion.