Why conduct polls?
How do they work? And how come you never call me? Some basic answers follow. Why Conduct Polls? Public opinion is an integral part of the news we cover: It informs and influences political debate, the state of the economy, social trends and more. Simply put, we report what people think, along with what they do, because it is important. At the ABCNEWS Polling Unit, we are news reporters first; we think of public opinion as our beat – like covering the Supreme Court, the White House or the Pentagon. In many ways the process is the same: We pick a topic, formulate questions, go to our best sources, ask what we need to know and report what we’ve learned. The difference is in the selection of our sources. Polling relies on the principles of inferential statistics, which state that we can draw inferences about a set (in this case, the American public) by examining a randomly assembled subset. Random selection is key: The fundamental requirement for any poll to be representative is that it be
