Title: Importance of Confidence Intervals | Insights Association
Headings: Importance of Confidence Intervals
Importance of Confidence Intervals
Market researchers: we need to do more.

Content: Confidence intervals are about risk. They consider the sample size and the potential variation in the population and give us an estimate of the range in which the real answer lies. Confidence intervals are a bright yellow caution sign telling you to take that sample result with a grain of salt because you can’t be more specific than this range. Think about the implications of ignoring confidence intervals for a moment. If you only report a number but you can’t be more specific than a range you are over-representing the precision of your results? You are hoping that anyone reading that number will understand it came from a sample and make appropriate allowances for sampling error. But will they? The science of decision analysis suggests they will not. In fact one of the major challenges in decision analysis is getting decision makers to make a realistic assessment of the uncertainty of their data. The natural tendency is to estimate too narrow a range for confidence intervals.