The Pollster and the Cellphone
America continues its obsession with polls. Link. Excerpt:
The rapid growth in cell-phone only households is pressuring public opinion researchers to adapt their surveying methods, which are based heavily on telephone interviews of people with traditional landline phones.
The number of households using only a cell phone doubled in less than two years, with the rate rising faster among certain groups, researchers found.
This is a decent time to recount Postman's words about polling in Technopoly. He has four concerns: (1) the pollster can sway the result by framing questions in a particular way; (2) polls normally use "yes" and "no" questions that can't take into account the intricacy of human thought; (3) polls ignore whether the person polled is ignorant or knowledgeable; (4) polls shift the locus of responsibility from political leaders to constituents. Here's an excerpt:
[T]he technique of polling promotes the assumption that an opinion is a thing inside people that can be exactly located and extracted by the pollster's questions. But . . . an opinion is not a momentary thing but a process of thinking, shaped by the continuous acquisition of knowledge and the activity of questioning, discussion, and debate. . . [W]e might better say that people do not exactly 'have' opinions but are, rather, involved in 'opinioning.' Technopoly, Vintage Books, 1993, p. 134.
Eric Scheske once served on a council that acted primarily to advise a fairly large organization that was run by one man and a small staff. The one man, it turned out, was simply incapable of telling the truth about anything. Eric, exasperated, finally suggested that the council meet at his house and not tell the one man. The other council members objected, saying in effect, "He has the facts we need to make our recommendations." To which Eric replied, "We have no idea when he's lying and when he's telling the truth. His presence is absolutely worthless, and probably worse." The other council members didn't have a response to that, but they continued to invite him (which was good, since it gave Eric ample reason to tender his resignation from a rather time-consuming endeavor).
Anyway, that's how we feel about polls: Sure, some might be good, but we have no idea whether they're truthful or not, so how do you know which ones to heed? We're better off ignoring them altogether, unless their results are truly stunning, in which case the methodology of the pollster should be scrutinized before credence is given.
