title: “Now Watch Me Tip (Blondes More)” author: “Cole and Silvia” date: “November 15, 2015” output: ioslides_presentation —
A popular blogger in the restaurant scene posted a link to the survey on his website, and Michael Lynn posted it on his website and referred it to his family and friends. It was not random; the participants volunteered, and the data is observational and entirely self-reported.
The participants are ‘adult women who had worked as restaurant waitresses in the US within the past year’, and had responded to the survey and qualified under their exact standards. In total, there were 432 women who had their responses used in the study, but as some did not answer every question, the amount of response for each predictor varies slightly.
It is true that, statistically, blond waitresses are more likely to get higher tips than waitresses who are not blonde. We question how strongly that relates to the restaurant scene, in its entirety, aiming to ‘trick us’ into spending more, since that money specifically is going directly to the waitress. The authors of this study had valid conclusions because they are treating self-reported data as self-reported data, and not depending on it as an independent or predictor variable.