In the market research field, there’s a lot of jargon. Below are the definitions for some of the words you’ve seen on the Lab42 website.

Statistical Significance – Put simply, this is the likelihood that a finding or a result is caused by something other than just chance. Usually, this is set at less than 5% probability (p< 0.05), meaning that the result is at least 95% likely to be accurate (or that this result would be produced by chance no more than 5% of the time).

Margin of Error -In statistics, a measurement of the accuracy of the results of a survey; the acceptable deviation from the target or a specific value; an allowance for slight error or miscalculation; an allowance for changing circumstances

Confidence Level – Statistical measure of the number of times out of 100 that test results can be expected to be within a specified range. For example, a confidence level of 95% means that the result of an action will probably meet expectations 95% of the time. Most analyses of variance or correlation are described in terms of some level of confidence.

Population Size -The size of your target market. The resulting sample size doesn’t change much for populations larger than 20,000, so Lab42 keeps this number hard coded at 20,000.

Response Distribution -The distribution of frequency of responses when not in a normal distribution; typically responses are biased towards one end of the spectrum. For example, if you ask hospital in-patients ‘What do you think of the nurses?’ when still in hospital, they are likely to skew their responses towards the positive. Lab42 keeps this hard at 50% to ensure the largest sample size in order to ensure the data is less skewed.

Sample Size – Smallest number of entities or observations required in each test sample to ensure that any variation between the characteristics of the test sample and those of the entire associated group (batch, lot, population, or universe) are due only to chance.