A question about the accuracy of Polls like the Gallup Polls?

@jonnythan Said

You should go take a statistics course and at least learn a little bit about the academic discipline before you call the field "silly" and insult thousands of highly educated, generally very well-paid individuals.

@Barbarella Said

Everyone knows polls get the answer they want by the way they ask the questions.

@jonnythan Said

You should go take a statistics course and at least learn a little bit about the academic discipline before you call the field "silly" and insult thousands of highly educated, generally very well-paid individuals.

@iwannano Said

I was calling the polls silly ,not the thousands of highly educated, generally very well-paid individuals.
If you call 'silly' an insult, then I will be careful to watch close what and how I post if I'm inclined to insult someone.

@jonnythan Said

The polls are what these people do for a living. It's literally their job to set up and conduct polls in as scientific and repeatable a manner as possible and get valid data out of them.

You were saying it's "silly" to think that their polls represent reality because they ask so few people. Well, a statistician won't hesitate to tell you that it's not at all silly and there is a lot of science, mathematics, and well-funded research behind those "silly" polls.

@Barbarella Said

Some polls are biased though, like polls they ask about teen sex and so on, or underage drinking - most people don't admit in polls that they do them so they end up thinking it's much less.

@plebian_angel Said

Do you talk about anything other than sex?

@jonnythan Said

The polls are what these people do for a living. It's literally their job to set up and conduct polls in as scientific and repeatable a manner as possible and get valid data out of them.

You were saying it's "silly" to think that their polls represent reality because they ask so few people. Well, a statistician won't hesitate to tell you that it's not at all silly and there is a lot of science, mathematics, and well-funded research behind those "silly" polls.

Quote:

Researchers acknowledge the need for rigor, logic, and coherence in their methodologies, which are subject to peer review

@El_Tino Said

Polls basically go like this:

They decide what confidence level they want to have, say 95%. That means that if they did the same poll 100 times, that 95% of the time the actual population would be within the range they set (eg. +/- 2%).

Given that 95%, statistically speaking, they have to sample a certain # of people to be reasonably certain the results are correct. They can just go randomly selecting people, and their random selection should have demographics more or less similar to the population as a whole that they are interested in. There might be roughly the same amount of dems/reps/ind in their sample as in the population, or similar age groups, similar races, etc. If one of these is different in the poll than the population, that might be an indication that the poll results are less likely to be trustworthy -- but in general that typically only happens around 5% of the time.

Quote:
All Rasmussen Reports' survey questions are digitally recorded and fed to a calling program that determines question order, branching options, and other factors. Calls are placed to randomly-selected phone numbers through a process that insures appropriate geographic representation.

After the calls are completed, the raw data is processed through a weighting program to insure that the sample reflects the overall population in terms of age, race, gender, political party, and other factors. The processing step is required because different segments of the population answer the phone in different ways. For example, women answer the phone more than men, older people are home more and answer more than younger people, and rural residents typically answer the phone more frequently than urban residents.

For surveys of all adults, the population targets are determined by census bureau data.

For political surveys, census bureau data provides a starting point and a series of screening questions are used to determine likely voters. The questions involve voting history, interest in the current campaign, and likely voting intentions.

@iwannano Said

https://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/about_us/methodology

@iwannano Said

Thank you very much , this helps quite a bit without me having to sort though any sarcasm .

@El_Tino Said

So they call people randomly and then weight certain people more than others based on what they believe the real demographics are. I guess that's as valid as their assumptions about the real demographics.