Jill Lepore is a
Harvard history professor who writes sensibly and knowledgeably about
everything she writes about. (She’s been a New Yorker staff writer for 10
years).
Recently Lepore took
a stab at describing the squalid reality of public opinion polling and
political polling.
Take the time to
read the whole piece here:
A blog-size summary
won’t do her piece justice. It suffices to repeat this excerpt:
“As these and other
critics have demonstrated again and again, a sizable number of people polled
either know nothing about the matters those polls purport to measure or hold no
opinion about them.”
And this one:
“ ‘The first
question a pollster should ask,’ the sociologist Leo Bogart advised in 1972, ‘is
“Have you thought about this at all? Do you have an opinion?”
’ ”
There’s also the
technical problem, which Lepore mentions: response rates to modern polling are
down below 10 per cent. Thus, no poll results represent a legitimate sample of
any group of people, and, thus, no poll results can be statistically validated
within an error range, and, thus, no one can say with any realistic confidence
what the poll results actually mean. Period.
I managed market
research and opinion surveys for more than 35 years. I understand too well that
pollsters today are furiously cooking the results to pretend that they have
surveyed a representative sample.
The survey results
that are reported now for public consumption are garbage. Period.
Don’t bother
participating the next time you get a call asking for your opinion. Your
answers are going to be french-fried by the pollster before the report is
published. Whatever you might say really doesn’t matter a whole lot.
Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2015 All rights reserved.
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