Public Opinion Polls

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1-3 The public opinion polling:
In a democratic state, the public opinion is essential in American politics that aims to inform public policy making. The opinion polls help to briefly present the views of the people to the government leaders who make decisions that affect to society. These leader often check the opinion of the public while policy decisions are made, and when there is an election campaign. Before dealing with the public opinion polls, when should distinguish between what is a poll and what is a survey. The two terms often are used interchangeably, but still there are differences between them. A poll is typically headed by a commercial organization looking for a profit. It consists of a short questionnaire administered to a sample …show more content…

It is everywhere, since the opinions are polled every day about different topics such as: taxes, the federal budget, the environment and global warming. It date back to the first days of the American republic, the polls were related to the newspapers. In 1824, The Harrisburg Pennsylvanian was the first one who conducted the first informal straw poll that predicted that Andrew Jackson wins the presidential election over John Quincy Adams. Even if they were inaccurate, they became important features in magazines and newspapers. By the 1920s, scientific polls are used by market researchers that utilized samples representative of people to know their product preferences. After that, there was the emergence of the polling organizations which are businesses that gauge public opinion through strategic methods, such as the famous Gallup organization. It is an American organization that introduce public opinion research on great numbers of topics by using the Gallup poll. It is first introduced and developed by George Gallup in 1932, when his mother-in-law looks for an office, the majority of people thought that she would fail. His poll showed that she has an opportunity to win and he was right. Then, it went on till it was widely used in 1935. These days, it is routinely measured public opinion on different social, political, and economic …show more content…

The questions designed by the pollsters should be objectively worded, neutral and impartial. This means they must not reflect the opinions and the positions of both pollsters and politicians. After designing the adequate questions, the polling organizations have to select the poling sample. For example, Gallup organizations made an interview with a quota sample of people who belongs to a particular demographic categories, according to the sex and age groups. Gallup had correctly predicted who will win in the 1940 and 1944 presidential elections. However, in the 1948 election, it incorrectly predicted that Thomas Dewey would defeat Harry Truman, this is called margin error . Since that time, the quota sampling method was replaced by probability sampling , in which samples are selected to be representative of a population. One of the common types of probability sampling is the random sampling, where samples are chosen randomly to be part of the polls. The random sampling is a good way to avoid any bias in the selection of the samples, like what happened in the 1936 presidential election, when Literary Digest predicted that Alfred Landon would beat future president Franklin Roosevelt. It was one of the most famous examples of a random sample bias in American

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