[lbo-talk] backlash?

Jon Johanning jjohanning at igc.org
Fri Aug 1 14:16:28 PDT 2003


If I recall what I have heard/read about polling techniques correctly, the accuracy of the polls wouldn't suffer from an increased refusal rate provided that they still got a large enough sample (not hard to do since you only need a few hundred or thousand for a national poll) and could adjust the results by assigning the correct weights to the various categories of respondents.

But the polling organizations still seem to worry about running into more refusers. Maybe it biases the results in some way that can't be corrected for, or just because it makes the public *think* the polls are less accurate.

But I think that the more important problems, as ever, are that the way the questions are worded greatly affects what answers one gets, that most reported polls hardly ever get very deeply into *why* the respondents answer as they do, which is usually the most interesting aspect of a poll, and that the way the polls are reported in the news media evaporates most of what is left of interest in them.

Jon Johanning // jjohanning at igc.org ________________________________ How good bad music and bad reasons sound when we march against an enemy. -- Nietzsche



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