Polling and Quoting Polls.

For the sake of the debate, polling will be defined as the act of assuming data about a large population based on the opinions of a small selection of it.

Quoting polls is essentially presenting invalid information upon someone for a number of reasons. For one, the way the poll is worded can often influence the decision of a person, secondly, the select poll group can come from a specific area which has a high concentration of people who have a certain frame of mind and thirdly we can not assume what someone is thinking without asking them.

There are many ways to word a poll in which you can essentially draw the response you wish from the general public, this alone makes polling an invalid source of data. If you were to ask someone from the Southern United States if they thought there were too many social programs for Illegal Immigrants, most of them would probably say yes, however if you were to ask "Would you deny Emergency Room Care to an illegal immigrant, or would you deny schooling to the children of illegal immigrants", most would say no, and therefore they support social programs for illegal immigrants, when if you asked the question a different way they wouldn't. Many pollers can and do use this for their personal gains/the personal gains of their customers. The support polls you see on the news are generated much the same way, and pollers will often ask questions that seem to single out their specific client as the right choice, making these statistics incorrect unless all of the affected audience is polled.

Another reason that polling is an incorrect way of gathering information is that people who were polled may not be an appropriate representation of the general public (stacking the poll). If you were to poll a group of people from Florida about farming laws, most people wouldn't care, or would say yes or no for the sake of purely seeming to have an opinion, and polling people only from Florida would be misrepresenting the general public. The only time this seems to be an issue in polling is when it comes to politics. The political pollers poll an area they know is strongly supporting them to artificially inflate the amount of support they actually have. This is shown throughout the various polls as conflicting numbers from poll to poll, which are often broadcasted throughout various news stations.

Lastly it is incorrect to assume what someone is thinking, because you never truly know unless you can read peoples minds, many people know this, but fail to miss how that is true in polls, because it is assumed that because x amount of people said this that this many people in all of U.S. would say this.

In conclusion almost any poll you see or read is generally providing you with information that is generally false, unless the whole population is polled (government polls usually are the only ones to do so) and you shouldn't quote polls in any arguments as facts.

 

I agree. I did a science fair project about 4 years ago based on how polling data can be (and so often is) unbelievably and ridiculously skewed based on poll wording and poller error or coaching. The 3-5% margin of error is a minimum, not a maximum.

On my project I copied one I found online. I asked people if they'd support banning a dangerous substance - dehydrogen monoxide. I talked about how it burned in it's vapor form, caused less traction for tiles, could cause drowning, ect. 97% of people supported banning it.

Dehydrogen (sp?) monoxide is water. People voted to ban water.


That's just one example...and I forget a lot of what I researched, but I don't trust polls after that project, lol.