Title: What is anecdotal empirical evidence? - Quora
Headings: What is anecdotal empirical evidence?
What is anecdotal empirical evidence?
Benjamin Golub
Frederick Dalpay
Quora User
Robert J. Kolker
Daniel Buttafuoco
Quora User
Martin Turner
Greg Olson
Toby Dillon
Quora User
Carol Willis
Andy Serrano

Content: anecdotal versus not. Suppose we have an empirical question, such as whether ladies in New York who go out for walks wear red more than they wear blue. There are two ways to gather evidence on this question. It can be collected rigorously, with the goal of getting a complete, or at least a uniformly random, sample of a relevant population. Or evidence can be collected non-rigorously: it may be that a few observations just happened to be available to an observer, and actually that the "empirical question" came about after seeing the accidental observations. [ 2]
In the latter case -- when evidence is non-rigorously collected and there's not a lot of it -- we call the evidence anecdotal. (" I was walking around and it seemed that ladies out walking seem to be wearing red today.") Such evidence has two features which make it relatively unappealing for scientific analysis. First, there's not a lot of it, which makes precise inference difficult.