To poll, or not to poll
Maybe this is perfectly natural. After all, who doesn’t want to know what his neighbours think or feel about the candidates in real time, all the time? Still, I must confess, these ubiquitous surveys have started giving me headaches 19 times out 20 with a margin of error of plus or minus four per cent.
Only a month ago, pollsters pegged support for the Graham government at 29 per cent. Last week, that was up to 41 per cent, while the Progressive Conservatives lagged at 36 per cent. Now, it appears the Tories have surged ahead to 42 per cent. Meanwhile, yet another report insists that a whopping 60 per cent of New Brunswickers think life in the province is peachy. This, despite the past four years of some of the most rancorous debate and bickering this part of the country has ever witnessed.
What’s going on?
Gallup – that venerable U.S.-based polling company – explains the art and science of its business this way: “Polls aim to represent the opinions of a sample of people representing the same opinions that would be obtained if it were possible to interview everyone in a given country. The majority of Gallup surveys in the U.S. are based on interviews conducted by landline and cellular telephones. Generally, Gallup refers to the target audience as ‘national adults,’ representing all adults, aged 18 and older, living in United States.”
What’s more, it says, “The findings from Gallup’s U.S. surveys are based on the organization’s standard national telephone samples, consisting of directory-assisted random-digit-dial (RDD) telephone samples using a proportionate, stratified sampling design. A computer randomly generates the phone numbers Gallup calls from all working phone exchanges (the first three numbers of your local phone number) and not-listed phone numbers; thus, Gallup is as likely to call unlisted phone numbers as listed phone numbers.”
Meanwhile, Corporate Research Associates (CRA) – which, in fact, provided the recent New Brunswick data – explains its activities thusly: “As a full service market intelligence and market research company, we are in the business of information. We turn information into knowledge, knowledge into strategy. That is the ‘Art of Understanding’. At CRA, we ask the ‘so what?’ questions, tell you what we think, and go beyond the numbers to relate what we’ve discovered to what you know about your company, your audience, or your customers. And above all, we do this with integrity, with imagination, and with intelligence.”
All of which are long-winded ways of saying: “Trust us; we know about these things.”
But are there times when public opinion polls simply fail? The 1948 U.S. presidential election comes to mind. That’s when both Gallup and its rival, Roper, erroneously predicted a landslide victory for Republican candidate Thomas Dewey over the Democratic incumbent Harry Truman. According to one historical assessment, “many pollsters were so confident of Dewey’s victory that they simply stopped polling voters weeks before the election, and thus missed a last-minute surge of support for the Democrats.”
This puts me in mind of something Austin Cline, author of Austin’s Atheism Blog, wrote recently:
“Do you really know what you want? Most probably assume that one knows one’s desires and that one’s desires are always ‘true’ – but that is arguably false. If desires are dependent upon what we know, and if what we know can be mistaken, then perhaps our desires can also be mistaken and be corrected.
“Good research combined with brain scans can reveal things about us that we aren’t consciously aware of. So if someone does some studies on us and then doesn’t inform us about the results, is it possible that they may have more accurate information about our real desires than we do – at least on some narrow topics?”
Good question. Should we do a poll to find out?
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