In Data 1.4 on page 24, we describe the results of a question asked by a national newspaper columnist: ‘‘If you had it to do over again, would you have children?” In addition to those results and a followup national survey, the Kansas City Star selected a random sample of parents from Kansas City and asked them the same question. In this sample, 94% said ‘‘Yes.” To what population can this statistic be generalized?

Data 1.4 on page 24

In 1976, a young couple wrote to the popular columnist Ann Landers, asking for advice on whether or not to have children. Ann ran the letter from the young couple (which included various reasons not to have kids, but no positive aspects of parenting) and asked her readers to respond to the question ‘‘If you had it to do over again, would you have children?” Her request for data yielded over 10,000 responses, and to her surprise, only 30% of readers answered ‘‘Yes.” She later published these results in Good Housekeeping, writing that she was ‘‘stunned, disturbed, and just plain flummoxed” by the survey results. She again asked readers to answer the exact same question, and this time 95% of responders said ‘‘Yes.”