# Does SurveyMonkey ignore the fact that you get a non-random sample?

SurveyMonkey has steps and a chart for you to figure out what sample size you need for a given margin of error or confidence interval, based on your population size.

SurveyMonkey sample size

Does this chart simply ignore the fact that you will not get a random sample, since you only get the people who bother to respond to the survey?

I'm getting warned as I type this that the question appears subjective so maybe I'm not asking it correctly. It's not really about SurveyMonkey but is a more general question -- can you actually calculate confidence intervals from voluntary response data using some advanced techniques that I don't know about?

In exit polls or national surveys, obviously they must deal with this problem. My education didn't cover survey sampling techniques in depth but I assume it involves collecting demographic data and using that to know how representative of a sample you have.

But aside from that, for a simple online survey, are they just assuming that the people who bother to respond are a random sample of the population?

As a point, there are inconsistent uses of the term bias. In probability theory, the bias of an estimator is defined by $\mbox{Bias}_n = \theta - \hat{\theta}_n$. However an estimator can be biased, but consistent, so that bias "vanishes" in large samples, such as the bias of maximum likelihood estimates of the standard deviation of normally distributed RVs. i.e. $\hat{\theta} \rightarrow_p \theta$. Estimators which don't have vanishing bias, (e.g. $\hat{\theta} \not\to_p \theta$) are called inconsistent in probability theory. Study design experts (like epidemiologists) have picked up a bad habit of calling inconsistency "bias". In this case, it's selection bias or volunteer bias. It's certainly a form of bias, but inconsistency implies that no amount of sampling will ever correct the issue.