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In this Vested Wisdom entry, I will give a brief overview of the polls which are being talked about online and on the television media. No, I am not going to take a particular side but this entry is literally about the polls themselves.

Do we have political polls in the Philippines? Yes, we do but not anywhere near the level of obsession the various forms of media have with them here in the USA. In the USA, there are new polls coming out daily from Zogby, Gallup, CBS, NBC, Fox, and etc. It seems every group has their set of pollsters. The catch is which polls are believable as the numbers are all over the place.

We have to look at polls with a great deal of doubt and count them all as untrustworthy for a number of reasons as polls are so very easily manipulated to distort numbers into a particular goal. What are the warning signs and things to question?

First, I have to go back to restating what I have said before. The USA is a very large country with 330 million people from a wide variety of cultural, ethnic, religious, and fiscal backgrounds. The media and the political parties attempt to get data to try and group people by gender or whatever. That is the first thing a person has to seriously question. Those reporting on the polling data are trying to advance a position or a story but the citizens of the USA are a collection of diverse individuals that are not easily split into categories. If a set of parents were ½ Native American/ ½ African American and ½ Caucasian / ½ Asian, what category would their children belong to?

Next is did they get a proper sampling of the citizens in America? Did they contact and speak in full with 2000 or more from a collection of small towns, big cities, Mid-West vs. Californian, high paid, low paid, business owner, employee, single, married, or any of the many things that make people different? Most of them say their sampling only came from 1000 or so. By polling standards, it must be at least 1500.

Then we have to question whether or not they placed a bias in the format of the questions. If so, then the information they present is worthless as it was set-up with leading questions. Remember that most parties involved will pick and choose the numbers they want to focus on.

Reading or listening to the details of what is being reported on is important too. The key phrases are “x% of people who responded to whatever say whatever.” Why is that important? If 1000 people are surveyed or polled and only 100 responded to whatever and of that 100 only 40 said yes, it would be reported as 40% of people responding to blah agreed. What they will not do is give you the actual percentages which would instead have been 4%. It is easy to manipulate the numbers to look much better than they are.

So what is the wise thing to do regarding anyone who cites a poll? Ignore it.

Thank you,

Anah

photo credits:http://segala.com

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