By the personal nature of the topic, aren’t political opinion polls open to bias?
A10 Today’s opinion polls are highly scientific and make use of proven techniques to eliminate bias. Whilst well conducted random and quota samples should present a broad cross section of society, there are many reasons why they may contain slightly too many of one social group. To manage this, polling companies will always ask respondents for detail about themselves as well as their opinions in the initial survey (for example, their type of employment) so that this information can be compared with the census statistics being used. The raw numbers from the poll are then adjusted to match the profile of the population being sampled. Opinion polls can also be reweighted to correct for bias. If, for example, a poll finds that it has 100 responses from one demographic group and it should have 110 to match other demographic groups in the study, each response can be ‘weighted’ so that they count for 1.1 people. However, excessive reweighting is avoided as this could otherwise impact on the a
Related Questions
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- By the personal nature of the topic, aren’t political opinion polls open to bias?
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