Depressing Statistic or Crappy Study?

In a piece about young peoples’ toils in mediocre jobs, we find this little gem of a study:

A study of 4 million Facebook profiles found that, after the military, the top four employers listed by twentysomethings were Walmart, Starbucks, Target, and Best Buy.

I’ve seen this statistic floating around a lot recently, and just… really?

I suppose this could be true. Or, it could be the result of a horribly skewed sample. The majority of people I know who work in professional (ie not Walmart, Starbucks, Target, or Best Buy) environments either do not list their employers on their profiles, make their profiles inaccessible to people they don’t know, or both. This automatically eliminates them from the population sampled by this study. Granted this is anecdotal, but I don’t think it’s far-fetched.

 

 

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