When veteran pollster Scott Keeter appeared at a recent gathering of industry professionals, he began his presentation with a somber caveat about the methods at the center of his life’s work. Telephone polling — for decades the backbone of efforts to measure public opinion and the subject of his new […] Read more »
Recent Books and Journals Articles in Public Opinion, Survey Methods, Survey Statistics, Big Data, Data Science, and User Experience Research
Welcome to the 10th edition of this column on recent books and journal articles in the field of public opinion, survey methods, survey statistics, Big Data, data science and user experience research. Yes, it is the 10th anniversary of this paper series started in March 2009. In the first article, […] Read more »
Creating the new standard in election research
Election polling is unlike any other kind of public opinion research, because you can measure your work against a known result – the actual tally of ballots cast. It means that when The Associated Press debuted AP VoteCast in the 2018 midterm elections, we’d know by the end of Election […] Read more »
The mathematics does not lie: why polling got the Australian election wrong
… Since the election was called, there were 16 polls that published two-party preferred results ahead of Saturday’s vote. Every single one of them predicted the LNP winning 48% or 49% of the two-party preferred vote, with Labor winning 51% or 52%. These polls were central to the public’s perception […] Read more »
Australia: Pollsters 95 per cent unsure how they got it wrong
The nation’s pollsters are facing calls for greater transparency and an overhaul of their number-crunching after spectacularly missing the result of the federal election. None of the major national pollsters accurately forecast the result, with all putting Labor in a winning position. Combined, Newspoll, Ipsos, Essential and Morgan had Labor […] Read more »
A polling failure and a betting failure
Well, that went bad for the pollsters. Every poll published during the election campaign got it wrong. I am as surprised as most. While it was obvious that the pollsters were doing something that reduced polling noise (and hopefully increased the polling signal), I had hoped they knew what they […] Read more »