Did they walk outside and ask the first 100 people they saw?
Is it an online survey that is sampled from their audience?
I am tired of hearing “a recent poll”.
Or “X’s approval rating”
what is this data from???
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Usually phone calls, almost always more than 100 people.
The hope is that the sample of people you contact will be representative of the nation as a whole. Lots of things influence that, like number and how you contact people, and those vary by poll and are only somewhat standard (for example, most polls still only call landlines, which many people say is causing systemic undercounting of younger people).
Because of these uncertainties… one poll means nothing. What IS useful is looking at averages of many polls taken around the same time, or one poll conducted multiple times over time by the same group (or, both).
It depends. The best is to check the source of the data (which are often in one of the lower corner of the picture or on their websites).
But for the approval rating, it’s mostly taken from telephone calls to random numbers in the directory. The size of the sample can change from organisation to organisation.
For the survey, it’s most likely an internet survey that was open for a few days.
And for scientific studies, well it’s often taken from scientific studies. But most of the time, they just took it from another article they read somewhere else.
It depends, but typically they are referring to a professional pollsters data, not their own. Pew, rasmussen, zogby, or an accredited University. These polls are collected through cold calls, but sometimes they do focus groups.
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