Today our guest contributor is otherwise engaged, so I am taking this slot to discuss polls. I don’t know about all of you but I am so tired of hearing the word “poll” preface a vast majority of discussions by the right and the left on what is going on in politics today.
What is really disturbing to me is that far too many Americans give credence to these polls and by virtue of that they can be discouraged in the blink of an eye. We have a difficult task getting people to the polls as it is without adding any reasons for them to claim that their “vote doesn’t matter anyway – so why bother”.
Here’s one that came into my inbox just this morning:
Just 34% of Americans correctly say U.S. President Barack Obama is a Christian, while 44% say they don’t know Obama’s religion and 11% say he is a Muslim. Read more at GALLUP.com.
Hmmm….any guesses on what demographic would actually be misinformed and bias enough to claim ignorance as to what President Obama’s religion is? Honestly! This is evidence supporting what the following articles are pointing out on the subject of how results shift dramatically when polls are taken from homes with land-lines versus polls of both land-line and cell phone users.
What should be abundantly obvious in today’s world of technology and smart phones is being overlooked when we take into consideration who is more likely to still even have a land-line. It is increasingly more common to have a cell phone only. Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight.com says…
Study: Excluding Cellphones Introduces Statistically Significant Bias in Polls by Nate Silver
“This is not a new problem — in fact, it’s one we’ve written about on several occasions. But it’s continuing to get worse. The percentage of people who have replaced their landlines with cellphones has climbed at a remarkably steady rate. (There may have been an especially large leap from the second half of 2008 to the first half of 2009, when the recession was at its worst and many people were looking for ways to trim household costs.)
Bear in mind that these figures are already somewhat out of date. The fraction could be in the high 20s by the time we get to November. And if the current trends hold, it could be in the mid or high 30s by the time we get to 2012. Nor does the figure include so-called “cellphone-mostly” households, which is when the house has a landline, but rarely or never uses it to receive incoming calls; another 15 percent of the population falls into this category.”
Another article at Fast Company.com adds to this conversation…
“The rise in cellphone-only households isn’t a new thing, but it’s also increasing in percentage. Half of Americans between the ages of 25 and 30 are cellphone-only, and two-thirds are cellphone-mostly (meaning they may have a landline for more expensive uses like long distance calling, but may not ever answer incoming calls). Even worse, sub-30-year-old Americans are more accustomed to screening calls than any other generation, making it tougher for an unknown pollster to get through. (Interestingly, the percent of landline-using households are slightly higher for those aged 18-24–probably since much of that demographic is either living in a college dorm or at home.)
Polling cellphones is expensive, often prohibitively so, for pollsters. The cost is around twice as high as it is to call landlines, so while many of the bigger organizations (Gallup, Pew, CBS/NYT, Quinnipiac) do call cellphones, the smaller pollsters often have to merely weight more heavily the demographics they assume cellphone users correspond to. And that’s a problem.”
I admit, I am a screener and if they were to call my home chances are highly likely that it would go unanswered. But I am at the other side of this pendulum where I long for the days before answering machines. back when if someone called and you didn’t answer that meant you just weren’t home or were unavailable.
These days with devices becoming virtually another appendage for a growing number of humans there is an expectation of immediate contact. I have been on the receiving end of messages from my father whose frustration grew in his message on my answering machine, then my cell phone and by email when he called and I did not answer. I really wasn’t simply ignoring him – I just wasn’t near a phone.
If that seems like I am digressing from the topic, I am not. My father squirms when he is visiting me and my land-line rings and I go on with what I am doing at the time…ignoring the ringing. His generation is more likely to answer all calls – the opposite of younger generations. Hence, they participate in a far greater number of polling than the majority of Americans. And, yes…he is republican. Old school R though…not this new incarnation of ReBiblican.
Sadly, even though this is an issue that pollsters have been aware of for some time, the reality is they are still more inclined to stick with calling land-lines. Why? It’s cheaper. Never mind that this is supposed to be about getting a sampling of where the population is in terms of politics and position – if it is cheaper to get the numbers for your client by calling a skewed demographic – what the hell!
When polls are taken that include cell phone users, for example, the statistics favor democrats and progressive issues more than when the polls are drawn from land-line respondents. Pew Research did a very informative article on this. Here is a snippet:
“Differences between the landline only and the combined sample include:
- Weighted estimates from the landline sample tend to slightly underestimate support for Democratic candidates when compared with estimates from dual frame landline and cell samples in polling for the midterm congressional elections this year. The same result was seen in Pew Research Center polls throughout the 2008 presidential election. In the landline sample, Republican candidates have a 47%-to-41% margin over Democratic candidates on the 2010 generic horserace, but in the combined sample voters are evenly divided in their candidate preferences for this November (44% for each party).
- By a 47%-to-42% margin more approve than disapprove of Obama’s job performance in the combined sample. In the landline sample, as many approve (45%) as disapprove (45%).”
The message I am conveying here is do not be distracted by the plethora of polls cited everyday ad nauseam. We all need to form our own opinions and take the time to understand issues on our own when determining who to support when election day comes. Looking at a 3 line poll result is the easy way out. Don’t let others make your decisions for you.
Good advice. I’ve never let polls influence my decisions, and I’ve always given the (very few) pollsters who have called me my unvarnished, honest opinion.
I’d go even further in noting how the “landline bias” skews stuff, especially among younger voters who trend Democratic as well as lower-middle-class folks:
a) As the article noted, it’s fairly unusual for pollsters to call cells. There are practical reasons for this that extend beyond the “it’s too costly” argument–telemarketing laws in some states prohibit survey calls to cell numbers in the same way that telemarketing to cells is prohibited (as cell phone usage in the US is typically “pay to receive”, which is the same rationale used to ban junk faxes).
b) Quite a number of folks (and an increasing number at that) do not use phone service that can be strictly labeled as “landline” OR “cell”–specifically, VoIP (Voice Over IP) numbers, which can range from Google Voice (which allows free calls to the US and Canada) to MagicJack and Vonage (two common “third party” VoIP providers) to ISP-provided VoIP (available through a LOT of cable companies and even some fibre providers) to specific “SIP Phone” services. To make things even more complicated, it’s actually quite possible to redirect some VoIP services to a landline or a cellphone–or BOTH (Google Voice, for one, gives this capability).
c) As you noted, quite a lot of people don’t answer calls at all that are “out of area” or unrecognised (and in fact, some VoIP services actually allow you to do this automagically)…partly because they don’t want dinner to be interrupted by telemarketers or survey conductors, and partly because there HAS been a phishing scam running for a few years purporting to be a political survey but which is actually a variant of the “Free Cruise” scam (which HAS been calling cell phones despite bans against telemarketing cell numbers, using the claim they’re conducting a survey as an attempt to squeak by…fortunately state Attorneys-General and the FTC aren’t buying it).
Thank you, Alex…I did overlook the VoIP users. As you point out that adds a whole other group excluded from the poll results that we are pelted with constantly.
Leah, the response to a survey or poll query item can be dramatically altered by the choice of words within the question. In fact, as a former teacher (who made up her own tests), I am aware that a single word choice in a test item can skew answers — many years ago I used to experiment with this when I formulated “opinion” polls for the 100 or so people who worked in my building at work. These questions would generally relate to work environment and management techniques. I was amazed to find that on two different versions, with only one different word, I would get dramatically different responses. I could write, today, a three-question opinion poll and get you two totally different results by switching a word to a valid synonym in half of them.
The myth of polls needs to be broken wide open. They are used today as noting more than propaganda “red meat,” and yet the media clings to them as if they were the Word of God. Every single newscast I see on the MSM begins with the latest polls, and the latest polls now seem have been taken only a few hours ago. Apparently these polling companies are making out like bandits — another “industry” gone wild, as it were.
I hope you will be able to use some specific polls, perhaps gain access to the actual poll questions and compare some of them to illustrate the faults within a political reporting system that relies, now, almost entirely on polls for the “news” of the progress of campaigns. All I hear is who gathered how much money, who spent how much money, and reports that certain percentages of Americans think this or that (as if these numbers were FACTS).
I see no hope of the citizens of the U.S. EVER having truly ELECTED officials until the campaigning “industry” (including a prohibition on television advertising) is totally debilitated and the People can actually think for thmselves.
That would be a very worthy project that you propose – to gain access to poll questions and compare them. Maybe one of our readers can do some digging into that. I remember years ago in college as a social psych student going over precisely what you have described in much detail. All of us are susceptible to be lead by perception and the experts that are working for all sides of politics now have been thoroughly trained and paid handsomely for their skills to extract the answers they seek.
We are pushing further and further away from a government “for the people, by the people” as these tactics continue to get more sophisticated.
I have been quite disgusted by the things I see done in polls (mostly by the Republicans, but I’ve also encountered it with the Democrats). A properly designed poll is deliberately set up to avoid the problem of wording… and if done right two or more questions will correlate, providing triangulation on an issue (thus helping to eliminate problems caused by words). The questions will not be leading.
The last few polls that came to our house, all Republican, were clearly designed to get a specific response from people, which is a major ethical violation in social science research. Thus, anything that the Republicans say based on “polls” is to be distrusted. It’s been over a year since I’ve encountered the same from Democrats, and while they weren’t as obvious about it, it still was detected in the wording of the questions (and may have reflected a bias on the part of the instrument designer) – which makes me tend to question some of the things I’ve gotten from my own party. If they really seek public opinion, they need to hire real social scientists to do the research and keep the political hacks far, far away.
A properly designed poll requires a lot of work – thought into what information is sought, the effect of the way the questions are worded, how to triangulate on information about issues or questions, and how cultural differences will change perception of the questions. Then the instrument needs to be thoroughly tested and the results analyzed so that if there is any “leading”, it will be detected and the wording changed. I’ve heard of instruments being tested three and four times before being used… on major social science projects.
Of course, that is if the party/parties actually want what people think, and aren’t trying to manipulate them – which is again an ethical failure.