Polling

1. What is the purpose of conducting a poll? The purpose of conducting a poll is to inform and influence political debates, the state of the economy, social trends and more. 2. How does random selection of polled data contribute to a poll’s validity? Polling relies on the principles of inferential statistics, which states that we can draw inferences about a set by examining a randomly assembled subset. Random selection is key. 3. How does sample size and margin of error correlate? Margin of error tells us how close to the full population we can expect the sample to take us. They correlate because a sample tells us how many is selected at random from a size of random samples. 4. What factors contribute to an individual’s opinion? Are polls able to measure this? Factors that contribute to an individual’s opinion are where we were raised, our faiths, our family and friends, education, knowledge, and more. Polls do not capture this information. 5. What can cause fundamentally similar polls to yield different results? The poll’s timing and data interpretation often cause fundamentally similar polls to yield different results. Differently worded questions on the same subject usually get the same results as long as they’ve been asked in a neutral, balanced, and fair way. This causes different results yet similar polls. 6. What is an example of a useful piece of statistical data produced by a poll conducted by the US Census Bureau?
They called up random sample of adults and asked who’s working. The sample was big so the error margin was small.

7. What were some of the flaws inherent to the polls conducted by early American newspapers?
The flaws are that they are quantitative rather than qualitative. They are good at finding what people think but only suggestive of why.

8. What presidential election(s) have scientific polls predicted incorrectly?
The election in 1936. The poll predicted the Roosevelt would win the