Chapter 6 Discussion

Why should a poll be scientific rather than informal? Respond to at least 2 other students’ posts.

Explain how information about public opinion is gathered
Identify common ways to measure and quantify public opinion.

Remember to  incorporate the course readings to form a foundation for your responses. Be sure to discuss relevant examples.  Additionally, you must properly cite the course text  (Krutz, 2020, page number). Consult the Discussion Grading Guidelines for additional details. 

I Have Attached The Reading Material.

First peer below

Scientific polls have the ability to provide qualifying information such as margin of error, polling dates, number of respondents, and population sampled. (Krutz, 2020, pg213) They can have more clear and unbiased results. Informal polls are more subject to being biased in some way or have questions which cause a result to trend one way or another by being a leading question. Scientific polls will take longer to produce, conduct, then analyze the results but they will probably have a much greater chance of accuracy. The more informal a poll is, especially face to face, it could lead to the “Bradley Effect” which is when people being polled feel pressured into answering the poll in one way even though they thought another. (Krutz, 2020, pg217). Polls can be done in several ways like face to face questioning such as you might find people doing at a shopping mall, phone calls or online through things such as social media. A newer method of polling in recent years is not so much about politics but basic interests and it is not considered so much a poll as it is analytics. Streaming services such as Netflix and YouTube monitor the viewing habits of their subscribers and can collect this information to use for determining content, much in the same way a poll would be used to help guide a political campaign. When these viewing activities include political topics or things such as a debate these numbers can be used to gauge the interest in the topic. The course textbook appears to give a false indication that all polls except Exit Polls have a possibility of error. Page 216 in the text states “Unless you conduct an exit poll during an election and interviewers stand at the polling places on Election Day to ask voters how they voted, there is always the possibility the poll results will be wrong.” This makes it appear they are putting complete faith in exit polls when it is perfectly logical to believe that people would lie about their voting activities, especially if the previously mentioned Bradley Effect has any bearing on the individual.

Second Peer below

Polls need to be done scientifically for the results to be as balanced as possible. Even scientific polls run into issues with accuracy so relying on something even less formal will likely lead you in the wrong direction for honest results. Since is logistically difficult to poll a large percentage of the country, pollsters will take random samples which “consist of a limited number of people from the overall population” (Krutz, 2019, p. 213) and a representative sample which “consists of a group whose demographic distribution is similar to that of the overall population.” (Krutz, 2019, p. 213).

These polls are often extremely limited in number between 500 and 1500 (Krutz, 2019, p. 213). Even with taking precautions to have a random, well balanced sample, it is unlikely that it can be accurate to extrapolate to 300+ million people. We have seen over the past few elections just how far off the polls were regarding elections.

The ways most polls are taken are either with randomized phone calls, online, at a random polling location, random home visits or with exit polls at election locations.

Some issues that polling can run into on top of the statistical issues are:

• Leading questions that try to cause people to form a specific opinion (Krutz, 2019, p. 217)
• People lack direct knowledge about the topic being asked about (Krutz, 2019, p. 217)
• Social pressure to answer a specific way (Krutz, 2019, p. 217)