… As analysts and industry leaders work on fixes and corrections to ensure solid samples and better surveys, it’s worth considering another source of problems in the polling world—primarily, too many polls released today are basically propaganda and don’t offer any real understanding of how voters process dense social and economic topics or how they absorb competing understandings of what specific ideas and issues actually mean.
If you don’t get a representative sample of people in your poll, your poll will be bad. If you ask poor or misleading questions—or spin the narrow margins of the responses to these questions as showing “strong support” for your issue—your poll will also be bad. Unfortunately, people spend less time on these problems of design and interpretation in polling than they do on the technical aspects of methodology.
Here are a few suggestions on how to improve the interpretation side of things: CONTINUED
John Halpin, The Liberal Patriot
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