I have never understood polls... their purpose, and the need for them.

[playahata1]

What irritates and puzzles me more than anything is how people are led to believe that he opinions of a sample of 500 to 1000 people ACCURATELY reflect the mood of a nation of 270 million. Once people see poll results that don't reflect their worldview/politics, they are ready to give up. I could give a rat's ass what 500 people say; they are NOT the majority. That is why I don't take polls seriously.

Your $.02? Peace.

[DAGDA56]

1. They're like baseball standings...

...the problem with elections is that they are a one time event...polls allow us to follow the pennant race, so to speak. Think of B* and Kerry like Yankees and Red Sox...eventually, the season will come to an end when somebody wins it all in October. (and it may just be the A's...but I digress)

[Dirk39]

2. One thing I always ask myself is...

did they ever walk through the ghettos of New York or Washington or Los Angeles? Or equaly those destricts in Germany or other European countries?
Most of the times, you don't even have to ask them, the answers are allready implied in the way, they ask the questions.
The power is always in the hands of those, who determine the questions as the answers are always prescribed in the questions asked.
But still the corporate media and the so called opinion-institutions don't dare to ask some people.
Hello from Germany,
Dirk

[unblock]

3. 1000 is a perfectly reasonable sample size

i agree that polls are overdone -- the media hugely plays up daily popularity and the horserace aspect of campaigning, at the expense of democratic participation and issues.

but if you've decided to measure popularity of a very large population, 1000 or so in your sample is certainly adequate, provided that the 1000 are selected carefully -- either randomly with no bias, or proportionately in accordance with relevant factors.

if the population is 30% for bush and 70% for kerry, what are the odds that if you randomly pick 1000 people that they'll but 80% for bush? extraordinarily remote. sure, it's possible, but the odds are overwhelming that your sample will be within a few percentage points of the distribution of the overall population.

this is elementary statistics.

[Maestro]

4. Polls are stupid

You can make them say almost anything you want especially if the wording of the questions is done is such a way as to solicit the response that is wanted. I continually fight for the right to education some children in their native language while they learn English. The general public will generally stand against this when polls of this subject are taken because the wording of the polls suggest that the native language and English are in competition and naturally when putting any language up against English, English will win as well as it should, but the poll shouldn't be worded to solicit such a response. The same thing can be said about politics and candidates. CNN as some of the worst worded polls. When they warn that they are not scientific they are NOT joking. I wrote a short op-ed on it some years back for a pro-bilingual listserv and now it is located at my website. Here it is.

http://www.irvingisd.net/~spollard/The%20Poll.htm

[DieboldMustDie]

5. They're easier to report than all those pesky issues.

:crazy:

[sendero]

6. I'm not a math expert...

... but it goes something like this...

For a given population and a given sample size, there is a mathematically calculatable margin of error.

For the population of the US, something like a sample of 1200 people will yield a margin of error of something like 4%. These numbers are simple statistics and probability, they are not subjective.

Of course, the way a poll is conducted (who is polled and how the questions are phrased) has a huge effect on the outcome. If you want a poll to have a specific result, it is pretty easy to conduct it so that it does.

Any poll in the US with a sample less than 1000 is junk.

[Christ was Socialist]

7. the Iowa caucus

100 million people vote

the typical poll usually doesn't get more than 500,000 think of the odds of getting a fundie, or rasicist et cetra they don't work. But america is dumb so they follow the polls I.E. the primary and i'll vote for kerry because everyone else is. so libs get our selves into it