Tell me about phone polling

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Ask/Tell > Tell me about phone polling

Arsenic Lupin: Apr 12, 2012; This particularly rapid💨 unintelligible 😖patter💁 isn't generally heard🧏‍♂️, and if it is🤔, it doesn't matter💁.

Two American elections running, pollster predictions have been substantially off, and not just at the Presidential level.

I have a question. When phone polls began, you only got phone calls you were somehow connected to: family, friends, a business or two. A call from somebody else was novel and might be interesting. There was no reason to (or excuse for!) ignoring a phone call.

It's 2020. Spam is inescapable, and a lot of spammers claim to be running a poll as a way to hook the fish. A couple of generations don't bother with land lines. Many (most?) people under sixty screen calls, if they even accept calls without a text message first. And there's no reliable caller ID.

1. Is it possible to tune phone polls so that they still reach a representative population?
2. Do people still tell the truth to pollsters, in whatever method they're reached?

In short, are phone polls doomed? If not, why not, and if so, what comes next?

# ¿ Nov 4, 2020 18:49

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# ¿ May 12, 2024 19:01

Arsenic Lupin: Apr 12, 2012; This particularly rapid💨 unintelligible 😖patter💁 isn't generally heard🧏‍♂️, and if it is🤔, it doesn't matter💁.

Jayne Doe posted:

I imagine there might be a shift to polling via text message instead. I certainly got a lot of "poll: who will you vote for in the 2020 presidential election?" texts this election cycle. (from what appeared to be a legitimate organization, when I looked into it)

But that still has problems 1 and 2: who replies, and do they tell the truth?

# ¿ Nov 19, 2020 01:03

Arsenic Lupin: Apr 12, 2012; This particularly rapid💨 unintelligible 😖patter💁 isn't generally heard🧏‍♂️, and if it is🤔, it doesn't matter💁.

KOTEX GOD OF BLOOD posted:

I highly recommend this article from the American Association for Public Opinion Research on the 2016 polling error to gain more insight into this issue.

This bit is really interesting:

quote:

Adjusting for over-representation of college graduates was critical, but many polls did not do it. ... Furthermore, recent studies are clear that people with more formal education are significantly more likely to participate in surveys than those with less education.

# ¿ Nov 19, 2020 21:46

Arsenic Lupin: Apr 12, 2012; This particularly rapid💨 unintelligible 😖patter💁 isn't generally heard🧏‍♂️, and if it is🤔, it doesn't matter💁.

As it happens, there's an article by pollster David Hill in today's Washington Post!

quote:

When I first undertook telephone polling in the early 1980s, I could start with a cluster of five demographically similar voters � say, Republican moms in their 40s in a Midwestern suburb � and expect to complete at least one interview from that group of five. I�d build a sample of 500 different clusters of five voters per cluster, or 2,500 voters total. From that number, I could be reasonably assured that 500 people would talk to us. The 500 clusters were designed to represent a diverse cross-section of the electorate.

As the years drifted by, it took more and more voters per cluster for us to get a single voter to agree to an interview. Between 1984 and 1989, when caller ID was rolled out, more voters began to ignore our calls. The advent of answering machines and then voicemail further reduced responses. Voters screen their calls more aggressively, so cooperation with pollsters has steadily declined year-by-year. Whereas once I could extract one complete interview from five voters, it can now take calls to as many as 100 voters to complete a single interview, even more in some segments of the electorate.

And here�s the killer detail: That single cooperative soul who speaks with an interviewer cannot possibly hold the same opinions as the 99 other voters who refused.
...
I offer my own experience from Florida in the 2020 election to illustrate the problem. I conducted tracking polls in the weeks leading up to the presidential election. To complete 1,510 interviews over several weeks, we had to call 136,688 voters. In hard-to-interview Florida, only 1 in 90-odd voters would speak with our interviewers. Most calls to voters went unanswered or rolled over to answering machines or voicemail, never to be interviewed despite multiple attempts.

The final wave of polling, conducted Oct. 25-27 to complete 500 interviews, was the worst for cooperation. We could finish interviews with only four-tenths of one percent from our pool of potential respondents. As a result, this supposed �random sample survey� seemingly yielded, as did most all Florida polls, lower support for President Trump than he earned on Election Day.

# ¿ Nov 20, 2020 18:13

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Ask/Tell > Tell me about phone polling