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What about those polls!
I may be overly sensitive to the whole poll thing since I'm studying them in my research methods class, but is anyone else annoyed by the constant polling that goes on in campaigns? Granted I'm listening to CNN and Fox on XM and not seeing the screen (so I may be wrong on this) but are they even telling us how they went about getting the sample for the polls? How do we know that it is representative and that it is even valid?
Tags: election, politics, polling
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Phoebe Caulfield on -
I can't speak for CNN and Fox in particular, but my feeling is that their polls are online ones that viewers who happen to be on the website answer. Thus, HUGE selection bias for reasons I need not explain if you are in a research methods or stats class. BUT I do know that as far as the phone polls done by campaigns, they actually can not legally poll cell phones. So all of us twenty-somethings that do not have landlines are left out (pretty big demographic, right?) That's why I never, ever, EVER pay attention to polls.
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Permalink Reply by Melissa Leeanne on -
Working on a campaign, we actually can call cell phones if those numbers are provided. It is pretty rare. We generally call landlines which definitely leaves out the twenty-something and early-thirties crowd with the tendency to have cellular phones as the only contact.
If no source is cited for a poll, I can only assume that the source is research done by that network, making it likely an online poll, which most likely leaves out the elderly and the lower class.
Should we trust the polls? I don't know, but I do know that I will live, eat, sleep, and breathe politics, polling, and gotv for the next two weeks. -
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