June 1991 LSAT Section 3 Question 23

A medical journal used a questionnaire survey to determine whether a particular change in its format would increase i...

DesHarp on May 28 at 11:33PM

answer explanation

I was stuck between A and C because the wording in C did not seem as strong as the wording in A. I also can not see the answer explanations.

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Emil-Kunkin on May 30 at 03:00AM

I usually think that worrying about the strength of the wording is a bit of a red herring. One can say nothing using strong words, or quite a lot using squashy terms. An answer choice can be phrased emphatically, but be completely irrelevant.

That is close to what we see in A. While the response rate being high is certainly not a problem for the surveys validity, it's of questionable relevant at best.

However, there's is a core flaw in the design of the survey. By only sampling existing readers, we can only draw valid conclusions about existing readers. Yet the author draws conclusions about the population writ large. To fix this, we would need to know that the population sampled was in fact representative of the general of potential readers . C tells us exactly that.