Talk:Public opinion poll

Straw Poll

I just noticed straw poll redirects here to public opinion poll, but it should be its own article. Can it be un-redirected? Shamira Gelbman 22:35, 4 May 2009 (UTC)

Old coverage bias section

Moving this here for now:

Another source of error is the use of samples that are not representative of the population as a consequence of the methodology used, as was the experience of the Literary Digest in 1936. For example, telephone sampling has a built-in error because in many times and places, those with telephones have generally been richer than those without. Alternately, in some places, many people have only mobile telephones. Because pollers cannot call mobile phones (it is unlawful to make unsolicited calls to phones where the phone's owner may be charged simply for taking a call), these individuals will never be included in the polling sample. If the subset of the population without cell phones differs markedly from the rest of the population, these differences can skew the results of the poll. Polling organizations have developed many weighting techniques to help overcome these deficiencies, to varying degrees of success. Several studies of mobile phone users by the Pew Research Center in the U.S. concluded that the absence of mobile users was not unduly skewing results, at least not yet. [1] Shamira Gelbman 04:27, 15 May 2009 (UTC)

Straw polling

Moving this here for now (maybe to eventually be moved to the Straw poll article, but more likely not worth it since it's verbatim from Wikipedia): The first known example of an opinion poll was a local straw vote conducted by a newspaper The Harrisburg Pennsylvanian in 1824; it showed Andrew Jackson leading John Quincy Adams by 335 votes to 169 in the contest for the presidency. Such straw votes—unweighted and unscientific— gradually became more popular; but they remained local, usually city-wide phenomena.