How do they tell if a poll is unbiased? Where do they poll for politics? Most people I know don’t answer their phones because of scammers. Thanks
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In the most simple terms, they will weigh their results.
Lets say you know the population is 50-50 men and women and take a poll asking who they would vote for in the presidential race(lets just say Biden vs Trump).
You take a random phone poll(calling) and responses you get are 75% women and 25% men. We know that women are more likely to vote for Biden and men for Trump. Knowing this, they don’t just take the results and publish them, they take the results and weigh them knowing the actual vote isn’t going to be 75% women.
Now, it gets way more complex than this because they also need to account for race, age, among many other factors.
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There are many different approaches. First of all, it depends who you’re trying to poll. Some polls are about very particular groups of people, which might make things far easier or harder. For example, if a company wants to poll its workers, it can reach them with its internal email system and chase up anyone who doesn’t respond. On the other hand, if you want to conduct a poll of, say, drug dealers, you will have a very hard time sampling the relevant population or even estimating how large it is.
Political polls are usually aimed at broad swathes of the population, typically “registered voters”, “likely voters”, or “all adults”, so the above factors don’t apply. Depending on where in the world you are, it may be possible to access a reasonably complete list of residents with contact details, or you might have to resort to methods such as dialling phone numbers at random or advertising online. However you do it, a significant fraction of the people you contact will not respond, and these people will be skewed towards certain demographics (e.g. they might have a tendency to be younger or older than average). Pollsters typically deal with this by limiting the number of people from demographics who are overrepresented, or by weighting their responses (e.g. if there are twice as many men as women, you might count each woman’s response twice). The problem is that there are numerous different ways you could divide a population into demographic groups. You need to try and focus on the factors that most affect people’s opinions (e.g. it’s important to get a 50:50 gender ratio if men and women tend to have very different opinions on the issue you’re asking about). This ends up being more art than science.
Another important factor is the question wording. It turns out that people are often quite strongly influenced by subtle changes in the wording, e.g. “Do you agree that…?” tends to get more “yes” responses than “Do you think that…?” This is because there will usually be many people who are on the fence or who haven’t really thought about the matter at hand, so it doesn’t take much to tip them one way or the other. Again, this is more art than science.
And it should be pointed out that pollsters are not necessarily trying to avoid bias. Ultimately they’re working on behalf of their owners/clients. If a client is willing to pay a lot of money to ask a slightly biased question to try and skew public debate, most pollsters will not turn them down. Some particularly unreputable pollsters have been known to fabricate results, or conduct “push polls” in which they contact very large numbers of people, ask them biased questions designed to change their opinions, and don’t even record the responses.
Whenever possible, they use a random sample. They pick people out of a hat.
Sometimes, as others said, they don’t get the mix they want of certain demographics so they balance it, again, randomly. But in a perfect world, a random sample should have no bias.
Every poll must be taken with a grain of salt. There will be bias everywhere. You need to see who wanted/financed the poll. You worked for CNN and wanted to create a poll about a Trump policy in the state of NY. You can factor in all the age, race, gender factors you want but it also depends on the location where you asking the questions. If you poll 10k people across NY but only go to large cities you would most likely get anti Trump results. If you asked 10k people across NY and went to small towns you would likely get a pro Trump result.
Another thing to keep in mind — not every poll is supposed to be unbiased. If you want to sway opinions, maybe you *want* the poll to say that 80% of people support XYZ candidate. There’s a difference between an honest poll and one that is intended for persuasion.
They really don’t because there is no way to ensure that it is. The fact is, most polls are purposefully designed to hedge towards certain results or to allow for certain claims. Any time you take a poll really pay attention to how the question is worded. They are not just thrown together usually, often times they are carefully researched and crafted towards a certain end.
Polls mostly are biased. Be it by the questions and answers in it or the people that are asked the questions. I very rarely see polls that are unbiased one way or another, most of the time someone has a reason to prefer one direction.
Polls, specifically political ones, are never unbiased. The fact that you have to voluntarily fill it out means you are more invested in the outcome than the average person. A large portion of people that vote don’t participate in polls and would refuse even if directly asked to do so.
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