Question

1. Find a poll online or paper-based that has not been used in the class.
2. Analyze and evaluate the poll using the 4 critical questions to determine whether the poll is problematic or not.

Answer 1

Dear student, please comment in the case of any doubt and I would love to clarify it.

Polls are a snapshot of the way people feel at that particular moment. Polls that regularly release their findings to the public — with information about survey procedures and question wordings — are usually pretty good.

Let us take an example of a poll conducted to find out the best movie of the year and we do have four options here. The options are Black Widow, The New Mutants, Mulan, and Onward.

Here, we need to take care of certain things to check out if the poll is problematic or not -

1. Is the poll random?

How can a sample of one thousand respondents represent the views of 245 million voting-age Americans? The answer is, you have to follow elaborate procedures to make sure that every adult American has a mathematically equal chance of being interviewed. If respondents are truly picked at random, their responses can be inferred to the whole adult population within an acceptable margin of error (often plus or minus 5 percent). Random selection is not easy. Or cheap.

2. Is it a good poll?

You have to be cautious. If the responses seem out of line, check the make-up of the sample. Are there too many Democrats? Not enough Americans? Too many seniors? And check the wording of the questions. That can make a huge difference.

Generally speaking, reputation matters. Polls that regularly release their findings to the public — with information about survey procedures and question wordings — are usually pretty good. That includes most polls done for the media (the CBS News-Washington Post poll, the NBC News-Wall Street Journal poll, the ABC News-Washington Post poll, etc.). It also includes non-partisan polls that regularly release their findings to the press (Pew Research Center, Gallup). Those polls live and die by their reputations, so they have to be more careful.

3. Is it rightly worded?

Always look at the way poll questions are worded. That can make a huge difference. Ask people their opinion of the Affordable Care Act and you will get one answer. Ask them their opinion of “Obamacare” and the answer is likely to be different.

Are the right words used while writing the question for the poll? We need to answer this.

4. Is it too complex?

We need to make sure if it is not too complex because if you give respondents many different signals, you don’t know which ones they are actually responding to.

These are some critical questions we need to ask ourselves before a poll.