Polling: Advantages and Disadvantages

Political polling has become one of the most important aspects of elections, especially presidential elections. There are many different types of polling which I would like to explore in today's blog. Each polling type has its advantages and disadvantages which I found very interesting to explore.

Exit polling according to the text book is defined as "interviews conducted with voters as they leave the polls on election day". These are the polls that are used to make the predictions on election day that everyone watches on television. The bennifit to these polls is that we can sometimes predict early on what the results will be. The downfall to this type of polling is that sometimes people do not participate or will not give an honest answer. This creates skewed results and like we saw in they Bush/Gore election, results that ended up being false and putting the country in a state of confusion.

Sampling is another type of polling in which a random sample is taken from the population. Everyone has the same chance at being chosen to participate making it truely random. This type of pollins can be acturate and provide up to date results. The downside to this type of polling can be much the same as exit pollins. Sometimes, people are not willing to give their honest and true opinions which can scew the results greatly.

The next type of pollins is "push polling". Hollihan states that this type of "polling occurs when someone attempts to to influence someone while using the deception that they are merely conducting a poll". Because of this, these polls are usually not very credible and can also discourage people from participating in polls in the future. These types of polls obviously do more harm and can not be trusted.

Mail surveys, which we all get and usually just throw away, are usually low cost and easy to distribute. These types of surveys can either be sent to a specific grouping of people or to the general population as a whole. This type of survey really depends on what the researcher is trying to get out it. These can be useful, but in current times it is generally pretty hard to get people to send back these surveys or to take the time to do them.

Telephone interviews are something we all probably grow to hate. I know that when I get a call from a campaign to state my opinion I usually just hang up. This is the most common type of political polling. These usually can be completed fairly quickly but if your like me, you probably don't even take the time to hear the fisrt questions. While these interviews can be very effective, the issue of economic class biases exsist. Hollian writes that "African Americans and Hispanic Americans are often underrrepresented in phone polls, elderly citizens may be less likely to respond to pollsters, and that as a result postratification statistical manipulations must be used to weight the dadta to ensure propor samples".

Internet polls are something that we see every day, even when an election is not happening. Since most of the population has acess to the internet, these polls can be pretty effective depending on how they are conducted and what company is conducting them. For instance, it has been proven that the AOL Time Warner company is genearlly conservative much like most of their subscribers. When they post a poll online for subscribers to take, the results are genearlly biased twords conservatives. This is the same for network news websites. If we could come up with a way to make these internet polls less bias, they would be extremely effective and fast.

While these are not all the ways to poll, they were some of the more interesting ways that I chose to explore. Sometimes it is hard to trust these polls based on the way they were conducted, but it is important to have these polls in order to gain a sense of what the population is thinking,