I’ve noticed most U.S. polls query around 1,000 people and sometimes even less. Somehow that qualifies for headlines like “Americans say…” or “Most Americans…” How is it acceptable that 0.0002% of the population is accepted as representative?
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Well first of all you can never ask all of America a question, or even half of it. So when you see an article with a headline like “Americans oppose xyz” is there really any danger of anyone thinking that the entire population was questioned?
You might say of course not, it’s ridiculous to question the whole country and you don’t need to. But if you accept that any subset of the group can be sampled to study the whole, then it’s a simple matter of statistics. You can detect trends of a certain magnitude with a certain confidence, from asking 1000 people. And the additional precision you’d get from dialing that up to 10,000 people is not worth 10x the effort.
Adults understand that polls are polls and articles are up front when they are reporting the results of a poll, just maybe not always in the headline.
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