Great analysis, Matt. Thank you for doing this!
Since I don't know the data as well as you, I don't think I can easily extrapolate this. But my sense is that, as the meeting size starts to climb past 50, we'll see less and less groups of 5.
Do you think that sounds right? Or wrong? Or should I quit guessing and go do some math? :)
Hi Jason,
The number of groups of size 5 actually increases linearly with increasing meeting size, as I show in Figure 1. The same is true for the number of groups of size 6, for that matter.
So it is the exact opposite of your intuition.
I created a spreadsheet in which I intentionally solved for the minimum groups of 5 for any number of participants. I found that, for group sizes 20-102, it was possible to have the percentage of people in groups of 5 decrease as the group size got larger.
I'm not sure if you and I are talking about different things, or if my math is wrong, or if I've seen something you didn't see. But I'll include the graph here, and I'll share the spreadsheet with you by email.
I'm very interested to hear your comments about this!