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Encyclopedia > Opinion poll

An Opinion poll is a survey of public opinion from a particular sample or pool. Opinion polls are usually designed to represent the opinions of a population, by asking or conducting a consecutive amount of questions or tests and then extrapolating the generalities and outliers in ratio to the larger groups within confidence intervals. Statistical surveys are used to collect quantitative information about items in a population. ... Public Opinion is a book on media and democracy by Walter Lippmann. ... Sampling is that part of statistical practice concerned with the selection of individual observations intended to yield some knowledge about a population of concern, especially for the purposes of statistical inference. ... Look up pool in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ... In statistics, a confidence interval (CI) for a population parameter is an interval with an associated probability p that is generated from a random sample of an underlying population such that if the sampling was repeated numerous times and the confidence interval recalculated from each sample according to the same...

Contents

History

The first known example of an Opinion poll was a local straw vote conducted by The Harrisburg Pennsylvanian in 1824, showing Andrew Jackson leading John Quincy Adams by 335 votes to 169 in the contest for the United States Presidency. Such straw votes—unweighted and unscientific— gradually became more popular, but they remained local, usually city-wide phenomena. In 1916, the Literary Digest embarked on a national survey (partly as a circulation-raising exercise) and correctly predicted Woodrow Wilson's election as president. Mailing out millions of postcards and simply counting the returns, the Digest correctly called the following four presidential elections. 1824 was a leap year starting on Thursday (see link for calendar). ... For other uses, see Andrew Jackson (disambiguation). ... John Quincy Adams (July 11, 1767 – February 23, 1848) was a diplomat, politician, and the sixth President of the United States (March 4, 1825 – March 4, 1829). ... For the pop band, see Presidents of the United States of America. ... Year 1916 (MCMXVI) was a leap year starting on Saturday (link will display the full calendar) of the Gregorian calendar (or a leap year starting on Friday of the 13-day-slower Julian calendar). ... The Literary Digest was an influential general-interest magazine in the early 20th century United States. ... Thomas Woodrow Wilson (December 28, 1856—February 3, 1924), was the twenty-eighth President of the United States. ... For the computer diagnostic tool, see Postcard (computing). ...


In 1936, however, the Digest came unstuck. Its 2.3 million "voters" constituted a huge sample; however they were generally more affluent Americans who tended to have have Republican sympathies. The Literary Digest did nothing to correct that bias. The week before election day, it reported that Alf Landon was far more popular than Franklin D. Roosevelt. At the same time, George Gallup conducted a far smaller, but more scientifically-based survey, in which he polled a demographically representative sample. Gallup correctly predicted Roosevelt's landslide victory. The Literary Digest soon went out of business, while the polling industry started to take off. Year 1936 (MCMXXXVI) was a leap year starting on Wednesday (link will display the full calendar) of the Gregorian calendar. ... The Republican Party, often called the GOP (for Grand Old Party, although one early citation described it as the Gallant Old Party) [1], is one of the two major political parties in the United States. ... Alf Landon Alfred Mossman Alf Landon (September 9, 1887 – October 12, 1987) was an American Republican politician from Kansas, who was defeated in a landslide by Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 1936 presidential election. ... FDR redirects here. ... George Horace Gallup (November 18, 1901 – July 26, 1984), American statistician, invented the Gallup poll, a successful statistical method of survey sampling for measuring public opinion. ...


Gallup launched a subsidiary in the United Kingdom, where it correctly predicted Labour's victory in the 1945|1945 general election]], in contrast with virtually all other commentators, who expected the Conservative Party, led by Winston Churchill, to win easily. labor may refer to: Work of any kind Wage labor, in which a worker sells their labor and the employer buys it Manual labor, physical work done by people Childbirth, especially from the start of uterine contractions to delivery Labor (economics), one of the three main factors of production Labor... Conservative Party may refer to: Conservative Party of Canada (since 2003) Progressive Conservative Party of Canada (1942-2003) Conservative Party of Canada (historical) (until 1942) Conservative Party (Chile) (historical) Colombian Conservative Party Conservative Peoples Party (Denmark) New Zealand Conservative Party (defunct) Conservative Party of Nicaragua Norwegian Conservative Party (H... Churchill redirects here. ...


American pollster Elmo Roper born July 31, 1900, was the first to develop the scientific poll for political forecasting. Three times he predicted the reelection of President Franklin D. Roosevelt (1936, 1940, 1944). Mr. Louis Harris had been in the field of public opinion and marketing research since 1947, when he joined the Elmo Roper firm as Mr. Roper's assistant and later partner.


By the 1950s, various types of polling had spread to most democracies. During these post-economic periods, surveys and analysis can be conducted in nearly every region. The Dean of American Public Opinion polling, Mr. Harris virtually engineered and pioneered new mechanisms for surveys and sector analysis also for various applications influencing all forms of information terminals such as the Bloomberg Terminal. Societies differentiate in reactions and tend to avoid sensitive political issues though these incentives provide a push towards the forefronts of economies and humanity. In Iraq, surveys conducted soon after the 2003 war helped to measure the true feelings of Iraqi citizens to Saddam Hussein, post-war conditions and the presence of US forces. The 9/11 Commission and over many years other various types of public Opinion polling surveys and analysis have also aided in post-war conditions and the presence of US forces. A Bloomberg Terminal The Bloomberg Terminal is a computer system that enables financial professionals to monitor real-time financial market movements and to place trades. ... Saddam Hussein Abd al-Majid al-Tikriti (28 April 1937 – 30 December 2006) was the fifth President of Iraq and Chairman of the Iraqi Revolutionary Command Council from 1979 until his overthrow by US forces in 2003. ...


Sample and pooling methods

For many years, Opinion polls were conducted mainly face-to-face, either in debates, through telemarketing, telecommunications, or through the general attitudes of groups. These methods and techniques variate though are widely accepted in most countries. Telephone, ballot and written consent polling, which can be conducted quickly and cost efficiently compete against other types of intensely complicated matrices, survey and statistical analysis sometimes unreadable through orthodox methods. Opinion polling developed into a popular application to popular thought. It also had seen response rates for phone surveys decline in particular cases. Many new formats not familiar to previous methods and conduction in entrepreneurial terms such as the following has also led to differentiating results:[1] Some polling organizations, such as YouGov and Zogby use Internet surveys, where a sample is drawn from a large panel of volunteers and the results are weighed to reflect the demographics of the population of interest. This is in contrast to popular web polls that draw on whoever wishes to participate rather than a scientific sample of the population and are therefore not generally considered as accurate. YouGov is a British internet-based market research firm. ... John Zogby (born 1948) is a noted American political pollster. ...


The wording of a poll can include bias, as the bias can be in the opinion. For instance, the public is more likely to indicate support for a person who is described by the caller as one of the "leading candidates". This support itself overrides subtle bias for one candidate, as is lumping some candidates in an "other" category. Polling arms variate in complexity due to these circumstances.[2]


Potential for inaccuracy

All polls based on samples are subject to sampling error which reflects the effects of chance and uncertainty in the sampling process. The uncertainty is often expressed as a margin of error. The margin of error does not reflect other sources of error, such as measurement error. A poll with a random sample of 1,000 people has margin of sampling error of 3% for the estimated percentage of the whole population. A 3% margin of error means that 95% of the time the procedure used would give an estimate within 3% of the percentage to be estimated. The margin of error can be reduced by using a larger sample, however if a pollster wishes to reduce the margin of error to 1% they would need a sample of around 10,000 people. In practice pollsters need to balance the cost of a large sample against the reduction in sampling error and a sample size of around 500-1,000 is a typical compromise for political polls. (Note that to get complete responses it may be necessary to include thousands of of additional participators.)[3] In statistics, when analyzing collected data, the samples observed differ in such things as means and standard deviations from the population from which the sample is taken. ... The top portion of this graphic depicts probability densities (for a binomial distribution) that show the relative likelihood that the true percentage is in a particular area given a reported percentage of 50%. The bottom portion of this graphic shows the margin of error, the corresponding zone of 95% confidence. ...


Nonresponse bias

Since some people do not answer calls from strangers, or refuse to answer the poll, poll samples may not be representative samples from a population. Because of this selection bias, the characteristics of those who agree to be interviewed may be markedly different from those who decline. That is, the actual sample is a biased version of the universe the pollster wants to analyze. In these cases, bias introduces new errors, one way or the other, that are in addition to errors caused by sample size. Error due to bias does not become smaller with larger sample sizes. If the people who refuse to answer, or are never reached, have the same characteristics as the people who do answer, the final results will be unbiased. If the people who do not answer have different opinions then there is bias in the results. In terms of election polls, studies suggest that bias effects are small, but each polling firm has its own formulas on how to adjust weights to minimize selection bias. [4] Selection bias is the error of distorting a statistical analysis by pre- or post-selecting the samples. ...


Response bias

Survey results may be affected by response bias, where the answers given by respondents do not reflect their true beliefs. This may be deliberately engineered by unscrupulous pollsters in order to generate a certain result or please their clients, but more often is a result of the detailed wording or ordering of questions (see below). Respondents may deliberately try to manipulate the outcome of a poll by e.g. advocating a more extreme position than they actually hold in order to boost their side of the argument or give rapid and ill-considered answers in order to hasten the end of their questioning. Respondents may also feel under social pressure not to give an unpopular answer. For example, respondents might be unwilling to admit to unpopular attitudes like racism or sexism, and thus polls might not reflect the true incidence of these attitudes in the population. In American political parlance, this a phenomenon is often referred to as the Bradley Effect. If the results of surveys are widely publicized this effect may be magnified - the so-called spiral of silence. Response bias is a type of statistical bias which can affect the results of a statistical survey if respondents answer questions in the way they think the questioner wants them to answer rather than according to their true beliefs. ... Manifestations Slavery Racial profiling Lynching Hate speech Hate crime Genocide (examples) Ethnocide Ethnic cleansing Pogrom Race war Religious persecution Blood libel Paternalism Police brutality Movements Policies Discriminatory Race / Religion / Sex segregation Apartheid Redlining Internment Ethnocracy Anti-discriminatory Emancipation Civil rights Desegregation Integration Equal opportunity Counter-discriminatory Affirmative action Racial quota... Manifestations Slavery Racial profiling Lynching Hate speech Hate crime Genocide (examples) Ethnocide Ethnic cleansing Pogrom Race war Religious persecution Gay bashing Blood libel Paternalism Police brutality Movements Policies Discriminatory Race / Religion / Sex segregation Apartheid Redlining Internment Anti-discriminatory Emancipation Civil rights Desegregation Integration Equal opportunity Counter-discriminatory Affirmative action Racial... The term Bradley effect or Wilder effect refers to a phenomenon which has led to inaccurate voter opinion polls in some American political campaigns between a white candidate and a non-white candidate. ... The spiral of silence is a political science and mass communication theory propounded by Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann. ...


Wording of questions

It is well established that the wording of the questions, the order in which they are asked and the number and form of alternative answers offered can influence results of polls. Thus comparisons between polls often boil down to the wording of the question. On some issues, question wording can result in quite pronounced differences between surveys. [5] [6] [7] This can also, however, be a result of legitimately conflicted feelings or evolving attitudes, rather than a poorly constructed survey. [8] One way in which pollsters attempt to minimize this effect is to ask the same set of questions over time, in order to track changes in opinion. Another common technique is to rotate the order in which questions are asked. Many pollsters also split-sample. This involves having two different versions of a question, with each version presented to half the respondents.


The most effective controls, used by attitude researchers, are: Attitude is a hypothetical construct that represents an individuals like or dislike for an item. ...

  • asking enough questions to allow all aspects of an issue to be covered and to control effects due to the form of the question (such as positive or negative wording), the adequacy of the number being established quantitatively with psychometric measures such as reliability coefficients, and
  • analyzing the results with psychometric techniques which synthesize the answers into a few reliable scores and detect ineffective questions.

These controls are not widely used in the polling industry. For the parapsychology phenomenon of distance knowledge, see psychometry. ...


Coverage bias

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 pollsters cannot call mobile phones (it is unlawful in the United States 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. [9] Cellular redirects here. ...


An oft-quoted example of opinion polls succumbing to errors was the UK General Election of 1992. Despite the polling organizations using different methodologies virtually all the polls in the lead up to the vote (and exit polls taken on voting day) showed a lead for the opposition Labour party but the actual vote gave a clear victory to the ruling Conservative party. The general election of April 9, 1992, was the fourth victory in a row for the Conservatives. ... An exit poll is a poll of voters taken immediately after they have exited the polling stations. ...


In their deliberations after this embarrassment the pollsters advanced several ideas to account for their errors, including:

Late swing 
For example, the Conservatives gained from people who switched to them at the last minute, so the error was not as great as it first appeared.
Nonresponse bias 
For example, Conservative voters were less likely to participate in the survey than in the past and were thus underrepresented.
The spiral of silence 
For example, the Conservatives had suffered a sustained period of unpopularity as a result of economic stagnation and a series of minor unpopular actions. Some Conservative supporters felt under pressure to give a more popular answer.

The relative importance of these factors was, and remains, a matter of controversy, but since then the polling organizations have adjusted their methodologies and have achieved more accurate surveys and analysis in subsequent elections. Swing in a British political context is a single figure used as an indication of the scale of voter change in a single constituency. ... The spiral of silence is a political science and mass communication theory propounded by Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann. ...


Polling organizations

There are many polling organizations. The most famous is the Gallup poll run by The Gallup Organization. A Gallup poll is an opinion poll frequently used by the mass media for representing public opinion. ... The Gallup Organization provides a variety of management consulting, human resources and statistical research services. ...


Other major polling organizations in the United States include:

In the United Kingdom, the most notable pollsters are: Harris Interactive (NASDAQ: HPOL) is an American market research company that specializes in Internet research. ... The National Opinion Research Center (NORC),established in 1941, is one of the largest and highly respected national social research organizations in the United States. ... When TV viewers or entertainment professionals in the United States mention ratings they are often referring to Nielsen Ratings, a system developed by Nielsen Media Research to determine the audience size and composition of television programming. ... This article or section does not cite any references or sources. ... --Shanel 02:55, September 4, 2005 (UTC) Categories: Possible copyright violations ...

  • MORI. This polling organization is notable for only selecting those who say that they are "likely" to vote. This has tended to favor the Conservative Party in recent years.
  • YouGov, an online pollster.
  • GfK NOP
  • ICM
  • [10] Oxford Research Group
  • Populus, official The Times pollster

In Australia the most notable companies are: Mori (森) is a Japanese family name. ... The Conservative Party, officially though less commonly known as the Conservative and Unionist Party, is a political party in the United Kingdom. ... YouGov is a British internet-based market research firm. ... GfK NOP is a market research company based in London, formed in 2005 from the amalgamation of GfK Martin Hamblin and NOP World after the latter had been purchased by German research group GfK. NOP is a member of the British Polling Council. ... ICM is a public opinion researcher based in the UK. It conducts surveys for, in particular, The Guardian, the News of the world, The Scotsman and the Sunday Telegraph. ... The Times is a national newspaper published daily in the United Kingdom (and the Kingdom of Great Britain before the United Kingdom existed) since 1788 when it was known as The Daily Universal Register. ...

In Canada the most notable companies are: Newspoll Market Research is an Australian company providing opinion polling and other market research services. ... News Limited was the principal holding for the business interests of Rupert Murdoch until the formation of News Corporation in 1979. ... The Australian is a national daily broadsheet newspaper published by Rupert Murdochs News Corporation. ... Roy Morgan Research Corporate Logo Roy Morgan Research is an Australian market research company based in Melbourne, Victoria. ... Look up crikey in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ... Galaxy Research is an Australian market researching company which has recently expanded into providing opinion polling for State and Federal politics. ... News Limited was the principal holding for the business interests of Rupert Murdoch until the formation of News Corporation in 1979. ... ACNielsens Logo ACNielsen is an international marketing research firm, based in Schaumburg, Illinois. ... It has been suggested that John Fairfax Holdings be merged into this article or section. ...

In New Zealand the most notable polling organization is: Angus Reid Strategies is a North American full service market research firm. ... Ipsos-Reid is a research company founded in 1975 by Didier Truchot, a Paris-based communications specialist. ... Léger Marketing claims to be the largest independent research firm in Canada and is a member of Gallup International Association. ...

In Nigeria the most notable polling organization is: The New Zealand Herald is a daily broadsheet newspaper published in Auckland, New Zealand. ... Current TVNZ logo Television New Zealand (TVNZ) is the main broadcaster of television in New Zealand, established in 1980 through the merger of Television One and TV2 (formerly South Pacific Television). ...

In India the major polling organizations are: NOI Polls logo The NOI poll is an opinion poll conducted by NOI Global Consulting, a non governmental organization established by former Finance Minister of Nigeria Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, in collaboration with the Gallup Organization, to be used as a representation of Nigerian public opinion. ...

  • C - fore
  • A.C Nielsen - Org
  • TNS

All the major television networks, alone or in conjunction with the largest newspapers or magazines, in virtually every country with elections, operate their own versions of polling operations, in collaboration or independently through various applications. A television network is a distribution network for television content whereby a central operation provides programming for many television stations. ... This article or section does not adequately cite its references or sources. ...


Several organizations try to monitor the behavior of Polling arms and the use of polling and statistical data, including the Pew Research Center and, in Canada, the Laurier Institute for the Study of Public Opinion and Policy.[11] This article or section does not cite any references or sources. ...


The best-known failure of opinion polling to date in the United States was the prediction that Thomas Dewey would defeat Harry S. Truman in the 1948 U.S. presidential election. Major polling organizations, including Gallup and Roper, indicated a landslide victory for Dewey. Thomas Edmund Dewey (b. ... For other persons named Harry Truman, see Harry Truman (disambiguation). ... Presidential electoral votes by state. ...


In the United Kingdom, most polls failed to predict the Conservative election victories of 1970 and 1992, and Labour's victory in 1974. However, their figures at other elections have been generally accurate. Year 1970 (MCMLXX) was a common year starting on Thursday (link shows full calendar) of the Gregorian calendar. ... Year 1992 (MCMXCII) was a leap year starting on Wednesday (link will display full 1992 Gregorian calendar). ... Year 1974 (MCMLXXIV) was a common year starting on Tuesday (link will display full calendar) of the 1974 Gregorian calendar. ...


Influence

By providing information about voting intentions, Opinion polls can sometimes influence the behavior of electors. The various theories about how this happens can be split up into two groups: bandwagon/underdog effects, and strategic ('tactical') voting.


A Bandwagon effect occurs when the poll prompts voters to back the candidate shown to be winning in the poll. The idea that voters are susceptible to such effects is old, stemming at least from 1884; Safire (1993: 43) reported that it was first used in a political cartoon in the magazine Puck in that year. It has also remained persistent in spite of a lack of empirical corroboration until the late 20th century. George Gallup spent much effort in vain trying to discredit this theory in his time by presenting empirical research. A recent meta-study of scientific research on this topic indicates that from the 1980s onward the Bandwagon effect is found more often by researchers (Irwin & van Holsteyn 2000). The bandwagon effect, also known as social proof and closely related to opportunism, is the observation that people often do (or believe) things because many other people do (or believe) the same. ... George Horace Gallup (November 18, 1901 – July 26, 1984), American statistician, invented the Gallup poll, a successful statistical method of survey sampling for measuring public opinion. ...


The opposite of the bandwagon effect is the Underdog effect. It is often mentioned in the media. This occurs when people vote, out of sympathy, for the party perceived to be 'losing' the elections. There is less empirical evidence for the existence of this effect than there is for the existence of the Bandwagon effect (Irwin & van Holsteyn 2000).


The second category of theories on how polls directly affect voting is called strategic or tactical voting. This theory is based on the idea that voters view the act of voting as a means of selecting a government. Thus they will sometimes not choose the candidate they prefer on ground of ideology or sympathy, but another, less-preferred, candidate from strategic considerations. An example can be found in the United Kingdom general election, 1997. Then Cabinet Minister, Michael Portillo's constituency of Enfield was believed to be a safe seat but opinion polls showed the Labour candidate Stephen Twigg steadily gaining support, which may have prompted undecided voters or supporters of other parties to support Twigg in order to remove Portillo. Another example is the Boomerang effect where the likely supporters of the candidate shown to be winning feel that s/he is "home and dry" and that their vote is not required, thus allowing another candidate to win. In voting systems, tactical voting (or strategic voting) occurs when a voter supports a candidate other than his or her sincere preference in order to prevent an undesirable outcome. ... The UK general election, 1997 was held on 1 May 1997. ... Michael Denzil Xavier Portillo (born 26 May 1953) is an English journalist, broadcaster, and former Conservative party politician and Cabinet Minister. ... Enfield is the name of several places. ... A safe seat is a seat in a legislature which is regarded as fully secured by a certain political party with very little chance of an election upset because of the nature of the electorate in the constituency concerned. ... The Labour Party is a political party in the United Kingdom. ... Stephen Twigg (born 25 December 1966) is a British politician and former Labour Member of Parliament for Enfield Southgate. ...


These effects indicate how opinion polls can directly affect political choices of the electorate. But directly or indirectly, other effects can be surveyed and analyzed on on all political parties. The form of media framing and party ideology shifts must also be taken under consideration. Opinion polling in some instances is a measure of cognitive bias, which is variably considered and handled appropriately in its various applications. In media studies, sociology and psychology, framing is a process of selective control over the individuals perception of the meanings attributed to words or phrases. ...


References

Additional Sources Pierre Bourdieu (August 1, 1930 â€“ January 23, 2002) was an acclaimed French sociologist whose work employed methods drawn from a wide range of disciplines: from philosophy and literary theory to sociology and anthropology. ...


Walden, Graham R. Survey Research Methodology, 1990-1999: An Annotated Bibliography. Bibliographies and Indexes in Law and Political Science Series. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc., 2002. xx, 432p.


Walden, Graham R. Public Opinion Polls and Survey Research: A Selective Annotated Bibliography of U.S. Guides and Studies from the 1980s. Public Affairs and Administrative Series, edited by James S. Bowman, vol. 24. New York, NY: Garland Publishing Inc., 1990. xxix, 360p.


Walden, Graham R. Polling and Survey Research Methods 1935-1979: An Annotated Bibliography. Bibiographies and Indexes in Law and Political Science Series, vol. 25. Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc., 1996. xxx, 581p.


See also

An approval rating is a polling term which reflects the percent of respondents to an opinion poll who approve of a particular person or program. ... In this diagram, the bars represent observation means and the red lines represent the confidence intervals surrounding them. ... Deliberative polling combines small-group discussions involving large numbers of participants with random sampling of public opinion. ... An exit poll is a poll of voters taken immediately after they have exited the polling stations. ... Ochlocracy (Greek: οχλοκρατια; Latin: ochlocratia) is government by mob or a mass of people, or the intimidation of constitutional authorities. ... A push poll is a political campaign technique in which an individual or organization attempts to influence or alter the view of respondents under the guise of conducting a poll. ... Shy Tory Factor is a name given by British Opinion polling companies to a phenomenon observed in the 1990s whereby the share of the vote won by the Conservative Party in elections was substantially higher than the proportion of people in opinion polls who said they would vote for the... A straw poll is an informal type of voting where the results of the poll have little or no direct results, other than to gauge opinion. ... An open access poll is a type of opinion poll in which participants are self-selected. ... All-Russia Center for the Study of Public Opinion (VTsIOM) Founding of VTsIOM Yuri Levada The founding and development of the agency was intertwined with the career of its founder, Yuri Levada-- the first professor to teach sociology at Moscow State University. ... This is a collection of scientific, nation-wide polls that have been conducted relating to the U.S. presidential election, 2008. ... Mean center of population for the United States, 1790–2000 (U.S. Census Bureau) The Missouri bellwether is a political phenomenon that notes that the state of Missouri has voted for the winner in every U.S. Presidential election since 1904 except in 1956. ... The European Survey Research Association (ESRA) has been established to provide coordination in the field of Survey Research in Europe. ... The British Polling Council (BPC) is an association of market research companies whose opinion polls are regularly published or broadcast in media in the United Kingdom. ...

External links


  Results from FactBites:
 
Opinion poll - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (2313 words)
The first known example of an opinion poll was a local straw vote conducted by The Harrisburg Pennsylvanian in 1824, showing Andrew Jackson leading John Quincy Adams by 335 votes to 169 in the contest for the United States Presidency.
Despite the polling organisations using different methodologies virtually all the polls in the lead up to the vote (and exit polls taken on voting day) showed a lead for the opposition Labour party but the actual vote gave a clear victory to the ruling Conservative party.
The best-known failure of opinion polling to date in the United States was the prediction that Thomas Dewey would defeat Harry S. Truman in the 1948 U.S. Presidential election.
opinion poll - definition of opinion poll in Encyclopedia (1165 words)
Since people asked to participate in a poll have the right to refuse, poll samples are not always representative samples from a population, and the characteristics of those who agree to be interviewed may be markedly different from those who decline or cannot be reached.
People asked to participate in opinion polls also have the right to refuse; this means that the sample is self-selected and consequently a non-probability sample.
The best-known failure of opinion polling to date in the United States was the prediction that Thomas Dewey would defeat Harry S. Truman in the 1948 Presidential election.
  More results at FactBites »


 

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