Among the most striking trends in the field of survey research in the past two decades is the shift from interviewer-administered to self-administered surveys. … But the results from self-administered and interviewer-administered surveys are sometimes different. This difference is called a mode effect, a difference in responses to a survey […] Read more »
The failure of the polls in Britain
… So where did our cousins go wrong? First, I believe they were operating on the wrong level of analysis. Their data were on one level and what they were trying to predict was on another. The polls were looking at the percentage of the national vote each party was […] Read more »
UK: We got it wrong. Why?
… We got the election wrong. So did the other ten polling companies who produced eve-of-election voting intentions: we all said the race was too-close-to-call. Only by admitting that we are all at fault can we start the journey to finding out why. That journey’s first stop is 1992. CONT. […] Read more »
Nate Silver On Missed UK Forecasts: We Flubbed The Margin Of Error
Data guru Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight.com tells NPR’s Scott Simon how all the forecasts, including his own, were so far off in predicting the results of this week’s British election. NPR Read more »
What on Earth happened in Britain? A WaPo polling guru weighs in.
On Thursday, what polls suggested would be a close race between Conservatives and Labour in the U.K. turned out to be a Conservative rout. We sat down with Scott Clement of the Post’s polling team to try and figure out why the final polls were so far off the mark […] Read more »
UK election 2015 polling: a brief post mortem
Our final call for the 2015 general election showed Labour and the Conservatives neck-and-neck, but the actual results gave the Conservatives a lead of around seven points. For any polling company, there inevitably comes a time when you get something wrong. Every couple of decades a time comes along when […] Read more »