> I did my last phone survey about 5 years ago and wouldn't trust one
> today-- at least if one is using a phone survey as a proxy for a
> household survey. If I had to do a household survey today it would be
> back to pounding the pavement door to door with multiple return visits
> to get the "not home" folks. If money was an issue, I'd take a smaller
> sample size, with tractable margins of error, versus the utterly
> unknown (and probably unknowable) error between the population and the
> sampling frame resulting from using telephone surveys today.
So telephone polls on political questions are getting to be even more BS than they used to be. But most news media still report them as though they were God's truth. I suppose this is part of their urge to appear "objective" -- anything with lots of numbers in it must be scientific.
On the whole telephone thing, my personal approach is to control the world's access to my ear by caller ID and answering machine. This obviously means that my wisdom on the political issues of the day is not getting picked up by Gallup, but it also saves me from requests for my opinion on the latest snack chips.
The cell phone method also works wonders, provided you keep the darned thing charged, which is my problem.
Jon Johanning // jjohanning at igc.org __________________________________ "I believe in seeing two sides to an issue so as I can show the other guy where he is wrong." -- Archie Bunker -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: text/enriched Size: 1623 bytes Desc: not available URL: <../attachments/20030802/bd421ca1/attachment.bin>