[lbo-talk] Why the GOP is sitting pretty, despite the polls

Gar Lipow the.typo.boy at gmail.com
Wed Aug 10 11:04:58 PDT 2005


On 8/10/05, Jim Devine <jdevine03 at gmail.com> wrote:
> WS: >Opinion polls and focus groups are based on very different models of human
> behavior and even science. <
>
> right. I would guess that smart marketing experts would see polls and
> focus groups as complementary tools...
> --
> Jim Devine

Right - which I acknowledged in my post. The point is that they are an in depth and partially subjective analysis. (I compared them to clinical experience in medicine - which is far from a dismissive analogy.) So to evaluate the validity of a focus groupp you need more detail than you do on a poll. The particuluar pdf referred (I'm not going to repeat it since it has been in two posts now) carries about the level of summary information you would get in a poll. That amount of infformation is valid for a poll. It is not for a focus group. Nuance is extremely important in evaluating a focus group. Unless you want to take the word of the person doing the study, not only their honesty (which I frankly I'm not at all confident of in this case) but their judgement, you need enough detail to see if the analysis makes sense. It is not that focus groups have less validity than polls. (Actually I suspect they do - but that is another and long argument I'm not going to get involved in). It is that those conducting the focus group need to disclose a great deal more of the raw data than you do for a poll - statistical or summary level information does capture focus group results. You need to know what a large percent of the respondents actually said. If you are a sociologist on this list, think of comparable sociological studies. Would you endorse the validity of the analysis of a small group sociological study with the level of detail you were given for this focus group?



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