This is something I would like to see changed (but I totally understand that it is a huge project!!) These are really two totally different tactics and so I do not think that result is going to provide good info.
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I think that this is a pretty huge job and I hate asking anyone to do more than they alreday are.
I honestly don't put a huge amount of stock into the answers. I think we can see the strong trends from what we have, and if we start breaking it down too much, people begin to pore over the numbers seeing trends that are not there.
Some of the things we did not start tracking for awhile (so they have results in the spreadsheet but not in the updated version) Other things may have been added but not updated yet. This is done by volunteers free of charge and it is not going to be perfect, we aren't doing a scientific study here.
I have done nearly 200 custom plans now and I am getting very similar results to what the overall stats of the site are. Most of them were before they started keeping track of them in the statistics. I've had a run of success iwth the custom plans the last several months but I do not want anyone to look at those and expect that kind of results. I want people to make decisions about swaying vs. HT based on the LOWEST expectation of success, not the highest.
I think it is best to look at the BIGGEST number and go off that, which will always be the overall stats of the site. That is a reasonable number and has stayed at about 65% for years now. Considering blue swayers are getting about 75% success, it indicates that it is reasonable for some of us to expect we are going from as much as 75% likely to have boys, to 65% likely to have a girl, which is HUGE.
Thank you for all this great info! Can I ask if there are any trends with swaying pink in the first month or two after coming off the contraceptive pill? Thanks
Exactly. This is an Internet poll, not a scientific study. These results are almost for entertainment purposes only. If we were doing a scientific study we would be tracking only one of these variables at a time and controlling for everything else, and the groups of people would be chosen at random. The way people do sway tactics is that different people use different tactics based on their personal needs and individual circumstances, and so it's like comparing apples to oranges for some of this stuff. The groups of people doing various sway tactics do not come into swaying with the same fundamental odds of success so it's very difficult to pick out the trends. Example, some people literally CAN'T do 60 min. of exercise because they are too thin to start with. So they might do less exercise or no exercise, but could possibly have better odds of pink than someone who had a lot of muscle mass. The stats will never be able to tell us stuff like that and the more we try to make it happen, the more confusing it becomes.
Trust me though - when there is a strong trend, it becomes clear very fast. I think that the tendency is for people to take the sway stats too seriously and start looking at groups of 3 people (or even 30) and giving that way too much weight. I don't think anything is gained by breaking it down into smaller and smaller subsets of people looking for a "magic bullet" because it's NEVER going to exist.