Are Public Opinion Polls Really Accurate?
How many times have you looked at the results of a public opinion poll and wondered if the results were accurate? Who did they talk to? Is it really possible to measure the entire nation’s opinion on something by asking less than one thousand people a question or two? Believe it or not, when conducted properly, public opinion polling is generally quite accurate. Conducting good survey research, however, is no simple task. To be accurate, the questions on a survey must be asked of a group of people–what pollsters call a sample–that is representative of the larger population. The questions themselves must also be good indicators of the opinions or attitudes the pollster is trying to measure and the questions must also be asked consistently from one person to the next. Pollsters generally worry about two sources of error in survey research: sampling error and non-sampling error.
