3 ms·
Maybe I'm just too skeptical of these types of stories coming from generic polling, but I will say that I don't have a high degree of confidence in polling done
by russnewcomer 11y ago
Maybe I'm just too skeptical of these types of stories coming from generic polling, but I will say that I don't have a high degree of confidence in polling done by random phone calls (the CNN/ORC poll listed says that on page 14 [1]). My wife frequently answers the political poll questions when people call, in part because she feels sorry for the poller. Answering those calls can take 15-30 minutes. So you're depending on the results of people who have 15-30 minutes to answer 35 questions about the government. I feel like there's a selection bias at work there already, and you're assuming that people will give thoughtful answers to the questions, that the order of questions doesn't affect responses, etc, etc, etc. You're depending on 1018 people who actually may not be statistically relevant, since America is a big, big country, to drive your thinking on that country.
Plus, would the responses to the surveys be different if the word 'disappointed' was used instead of angry? And would the perception of the responses be different?
Secondarily, and this is far more anecdotal, but I am friends with a fairly wide swath of people via social media, from conservatives to libertarians to liberals to progressives. The key takeaway that I have from watching all of their posting and all of their interactions is that people are angry at others. And people have always been easily angered by others, it's just that the modern American landscape allows for a) easier access to others and b) easier access to well-written, rational condemnation of others than can be easily shared. But reading through my feed,
Maybe Americans aren't actually angry, but since it's easier to construct understandable stories using language like anger, Americans feel like they should be angry?
[1]http://edition.cnn.com/2015/12/29/politics/cnn-orc-poll-full-results-obama-approval/index.html http://edition.cnn.com/2015/12/29/politics/cnn-orc-poll-full...
- ksk 11y agoIts nice to have healthy skepticism for these kinds of things, but I don't think we as laypeople know more about polling than the polling organizations whose job it is to eliminate biases with regards to the verbiage of questions and sampling. A lot of this stuff is based on well established models and prior theories.
- russnewcomer 11y agoWell, I am personally skeptical that those well-established models and prior theories are a) being followed and b) as effective as thought. More a) than b). But my greater skepticism comes from basing policy or expectations of a country on simplifications. Again, I wonder if they asked the same number of people if the same questions and subbed out disappointed for angry if they would get a significantly different response?
- TheOtherHobbes 11y agoUK pollsters called the UK election completely wrong last year - far outside any reasonable margin of error. Questions were asked, but there were no answers beyond "We asked the wrong people."
- IanCal 11y ago> You're depending on 1018 people who actually may not be statistically relevant, since America is a big, big country, to drive your thinking on that country. It's a problem if they're badly sampled, but the sample size you need is doesn't really change as you increase your population, as long as your population is a lot bigger than your sample size. If 1000 people would be OK for a population of 1M, then it should be just as good for a population of 100M. I don't think this really invalidates your point, it's just a misconception I see a lot. http://www.surveysystem.com/sscalc.htm http://www.surveysystem.com/sscalc.htm
- russnewcomer 11y agoYou are correct, and what I should have said was something closer to "You're depending on the answers from 1018 people to be statistically relevant, and they may not be because by the end of the survery people just hurriedly say whatever to get the survey over with, and I'd bet that 50% of the answers should probably be discounted, so you're depending on what may not be a statistically relevant survery, since America is a big, big country, to drive your thinking on that country."
- jndsn402 11y agoI don't disagree with the math, but wouldn't it be the case that it's easier to get a biased sample from 1000/100M people than 1000/1M people? For instance, maybe your sampling ignored a particular region of the country or socioeconomic strata etc.
- chimeracoder 11y ago> I don't disagree with the math, but wouldn't it be the case that it's easier to get a biased sample from 1000/100M people than 1000/1M people? It's not the population size that matters; it's the variance in the underlying population. Mathematically, the sample size needed to construct an n% confidence interval for a normal distribution is independent of the population size (the first derivative is zero).
- humanrebar 11y ago> then it should be just as good for a population of 100M Assuming an normal (or similar) distribution. It seems plausible to me that we're in some sort of multi-modal period in our history. It may not be sophisticated enough to just take a mean or group opinions into five buckets on a one-dimensional graph.