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The importance of representative sampling is taught in undergraduate statistics courses. Do you have any reason to believe that pollsters and other statisticia
by bleepblorp 6y ago
The importance of representative sampling is taught in undergraduate statistics courses.
Do you have any reason to believe that pollsters and other statisticians are so ignorant of their own field not to understand this?
- ars 6y agoYes, I suspect most pollsters are Democrats, and are not aware of how they come across to Republicans. So they think they have a representative sample, but they really don't. It can be explained simply by pollsters mainly living in large cities, and not really understanding rural Americans.
- kenjackson 6y agoWhy did this just start happening relatively recently?
- SpicyLemonZest 6y agoBecause polling response rates fell off a cliff over the past decade or two, leaving a sample population much different than was historically available. (https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2012/05/15/assessing-the-representativeness-of-public-opinion-surveys/ https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2012/05/15/assessing-th...)
- kenjackson 6y agoIs that because of cell phones or some other reason?
- rayiner 6y agoRead up on how political polling works. It’s very hard to get a representative sample or even to know what a representative sample looks like.
- SilasX 6y agoYou're saying that, because a failure mode is taught in school, it must be a solved problem in the real world?