If you've taken time out to tweet in the last few days, you're hanging out in a hot, black neighborhood, or at least that's the latest news from Edison Research. African Americans make up roughly 12 percent of the population, but evidently, we occupy nearly 25 percent of the real estate on Twitter--a pretty strong showing.

There's no objective reason to doubt Edison's motives in reporting such an interesting statistic. The firm has a solid, 12-year history of producing reports like Twitter Usage in 2010, the source of the new statistics on how much time black people supposedly spend tweeting, or at least closely monitoring the tweets of others.

It also helps that the random sample of Americans selected for the Twitter study was taken from data gathered by Arbitron, an organization with a long track record in media research. So why do some statisticians question the Twitter study results?

The primary issue is the size of the population sample the people at Edison used to draw their conclusion. Edison gathered statistics from a randomly selected group of 1,753 Americans, originally surveyed by Arbitron for their Internet and Multimedia Series. Not a huge number, but large enough to make reasonable projections using reliable statistical models.

''The larger study sample is a hybrid of two sources,'' explains Bill Rose, senior vice president of marketing for Arbitron. ''Roughly one half of the sample were people who filled out Arbitron diaries, the other half were gathered from a random-digit dialing survey using landlines and cell phones,'' said Rose, adding that 12.8 percent of the group was African American, a near-perfect representation of the U.S. population. But there is some doubt about Arbitron's ability to assess African-American media trends when you look at its history. The company has struggled for years to accurately represent African-American and Hispanic radio listeners. It even settled a lawsuit related to the issue, brought by New York's attorney general, as recently as 2009. The settlement states that Arbitron had to include a larger number of cell phone users (who are more likely to be African Americans or Hispanics) in its surveys.

Assuming Arbitron made the needed adjustments to its methods, there's still a reason to question what Edison did with that sample of 1,753 people. ''The statistic [more than 24 percent of Twitter users are African-American], was based on the number of monthly Twitter users in the study,'' explained Jason Hollins, a vice president at Edison. That means the data that was used to assume that African Americans comprise one-quarter of Twitter's 17 million users in the United States was based on a survey of 105 people who reported that they visit Twitter at least once a month. No matter how you crunch the numbers, it's difficult to make a solid assumption about 17 million people from reviewing the habits of such a small group.

''There's a risk that as you get a smaller and smaller sample, there's a greater chance that you do not have a representative sample of a population,'' said David Swanson, a statistician and professor of sociology at the University of California at Riverside and expert in population estimation forecasting. ''The real question is 'what is the margin for error at that point,''' Swanson said. ''There's a huge amount of uncertainty with really small samples.''