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visitor4rmindia 18y ago

This is very interesting - does anyone know just how many of the polls we see on TV or in magazines are voluntary response polls? Should we be ignoring their results? Intesting Anecdote: NDTV 24x7 (something like CNN in India) had extensive polls in the last (2004) election where they predicted a huge victory for the BJP party. They had poll results state-wise and interviews with eminent psephologists and so on, all predicting a resounding victory. In the end, BJP lost - and quite badly too! Lies, damned lies, and statistics...

tokenadult 18y ago
This is very interesting - does anyone know just how many of the polls we see on TV or in magazines are voluntary response polls? Polls in general interest magazines, especially women's magazines, are usually wholly unreliable for modeling reality. (One thing that happens is the college-age men stuff the supply of replies full of phony responses, especially if the survey is about some salacious topic such as sexual behavior.) I responded to a telephone call that came to my home phone number from Gallup Poll a few weeks after the United States presidential election. Gallup attempts to proactively call all households in the United States, and to correct for households that refuse to answer its calls. The interviews are quite long, and they ask a lot of demographic questions for stratifying the data gathered. If my caller I.D. box had not said "Gallup Poll," I never would have picked up my phone for a cold call. I got another poll call just this weeked, and many years ago got a call from the Harris Poll. The major polling companies attempt to actively gather random data samples, so what they do is distinguishable from voluntary response. But a magazine that writes a little sidebar "email your response to [email address]" is simply gathering worthless data. The same is true of TV stations that tell viewers to cell-phone text a response to some number they designate, or websites that have a poll form for anyone who surfs by. If you are gathering data to improve a website, you are much better off conducting a live usability study in which you observe the user directly than simply polling visitors who voluntarily respond.