No, modern polling is mostly useless. The respondents skew heavily in one direction (old people that answer the phone).
There is no sample size big enough to account for a complete cultural shift away from answering phone calls and text messages from people you don’t know.
Most polls report a response rate of about 90%, as reported by a PEW analysis of available studies. However, that is a made up number which does not account for attrition (quitters) or non-response to panel recruitment (no answers). If you include those numbers the real response rate is about 3%. Which means between the initial contact and giving their opinion 97% of people asked don’t participate in a given poll.
This comment comes off as if you think the people working at Pew, one of the most respected orgs for surveys out there, are just plain stupid and are dumb enough to leave a giant hole in their data when concerning young people. What you’re pointing out is a challenge in modern surveys but this is stuff that Pew is actively working to correct and with the midterm polling, they were far more accurate.
That’s all due to incorrect weighting of the data but Pew notes that polls specifically like the ones referenced here when looking at national sentiment tend to be much more accurate.
Thank you for posting that. It was well-written, and did a great job clarifying both why previous polls were inaccurate, and why they’re likely better now. I was particularly interested to read that the margin of error may be about double what is reported.
You should make this a top level post in this group. It is worth discussing on its own.
This is a great article to discuss, and I think it’d make a fine post all by itself.
However, “Restoring people’s confidence in polling is an important goal” is at the top of the article for a reason.
We can expect that the answer “polling is not useful” will not be explored. Limitations to polling concepts will be minimized. The article has stated one of its goals, if not its main goal.
No, modern polling is mostly useless. The respondents skew heavily in one direction (old people that answer the phone).
There is no sample size big enough to account for a complete cultural shift away from answering phone calls and text messages from people you don’t know.
Most polls report a response rate of about 90%, as reported by a PEW analysis of available studies. However, that is a made up number which does not account for attrition (quitters) or non-response to panel recruitment (no answers). If you include those numbers the real response rate is about 3%. Which means between the initial contact and giving their opinion 97% of people asked don’t participate in a given poll.
This comment comes off as if you think the people working at Pew, one of the most respected orgs for surveys out there, are just plain stupid and are dumb enough to leave a giant hole in their data when concerning young people. What you’re pointing out is a challenge in modern surveys but this is stuff that Pew is actively working to correct and with the midterm polling, they were far more accurate.
That’s all due to incorrect weighting of the data but Pew notes that polls specifically like the ones referenced here when looking at national sentiment tend to be much more accurate.
If you’d like to read more about the problems with polling Pew has a whole write up on it
Thank you for posting that. It was well-written, and did a great job clarifying both why previous polls were inaccurate, and why they’re likely better now. I was particularly interested to read that the margin of error may be about double what is reported.
You should make this a top level post in this group. It is worth discussing on its own.
This is a great article to discuss, and I think it’d make a fine post all by itself.
However, “Restoring people’s confidence in polling is an important goal” is at the top of the article for a reason.
We can expect that the answer “polling is not useful” will not be explored. Limitations to polling concepts will be minimized. The article has stated one of its goals, if not its main goal.