Pollster.com: Sampling Issues

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Sampling Issues

May 17, 2008

AAPOR 2008: Patrick Murray on RBS vs RDD

Another in series of brief interviews conducted at this week's AAPOR Conference, this one from Patrick Murray, director of the Polling Institute at Monmouth University. His paper, co-authored by Monmouth University colleague Timothy MacKinnon, concerned an experiment with random digit...

April 03, 2008

Pollster Bites Pollster

My NationalJournal.com column , which discusses the CBS panel survey conducted after the Barack Obama's speech on race and Jeremiah Wright and the attack on it by Matt Towery of InsiderAdvantage, is now online. If this topic is of interest,...

April 01, 2008

Hickman on the Gallup Daily

Yesterday, in a burst of blogger exuberance, I posted some charts emailed by my long ago employer Harrison Hickman, the Democratic pollster now associated with the firm Global Strategy Group who also conducted surveys earlier this year for John Edwards....

April 01, 2008

Re [2]: Day-of-Week Effect in Gallup Daily?

Gallup's Jeff Jones responds to my post yesterday suggesting a possible day-of-week effect in the Gallup Daily tracking of the Obama-Clinton race: We appreciate the interest people have in Gallup Daily tracking data. Your hypothesis of possible day-of-week effects in...

April 01, 2008

Re: Day-of-Week Effect in Gallup Daily?

A quick note to regular readers that I updated my original post on the Gallup Daily tracking below with some second thoughts about the statistical significance of the apparent day-of-week effect. While some pattern may exist, the evidence available is...

March 31, 2008

Day-of-Week Effect in Gallup Daily?

I received some interesting charts this afternoon from Harrison Hickman and Ben Margolis, both of the Democratic firm Global Strategy Group that polled for John Edwards until he withdrew from the race (full disclosure: Hickman was my employer longer ago...

February 04, 2008

Re: Will Pollsters Call During the Superbowl

On Friday I posted a brief item wondering about what effect last night's Super Bowl broadcast might have on number collected over the weekend. Gallup emailed to say they would not call during the game, and I assume most pollsters...

February 01, 2008

Will Pollsters Call During the Superbowl?

ABC News and The Washington Post reported results of a new poll today, which asks Americans which major event they are more excited about, the Super Bowl or the Super Tuesday primaries. It got me thinking about a very good...

August 08, 2007

Screens & RDD: The ABC/Post Survey

It was probably Murphy's Law. Within hours of my posting a review of the sorry state of disclosure of early primary poll methodology, ABC News and The Washington Post released a new survey of likely caucus goers in Iowa...

May 10, 2007

Even Polls About Baseball...

Let's take a break from political polling controversies and focus on something of hopefully broader interest. A controversy involving a poll on baseball. Larry Brown, who blogs MLB Clubhouse on AOL, posted scathing criticism a few days ago of...

May 02, 2007

The Field Poll and RBS Sampling

One of the more intriguing things included in last week's post on recent polling in California is the shift by the state's venerable Field Poll to voter registration list sampling for their pre-election surveys. The debate over the use...

January 25, 2007

Sampling Error - What It Isn't

Back to basics for a moment, to a point we cannot make often enough. Yes, polls report a "margin of error," which derives from the random variation that comes from drawing a sample rather than interviewing the full population. But...

November 03, 2006

Weekend Interviewing?

Slate's Daniel Engber takes a look at an issue right up our alley: Are weekend interviews problematic and do surveys condcuted on Friday and Saturday evenings skew toward Democrats? Like many pollsters, I have an opinion on this issue less...

October 23, 2006

Andrew Kohut Interview

Andrew Kohut is the President of the Pew Research Center and arguably the dean of the survey research profession. President of the Gallup Organization from 1979 to 1989, Kohut recently received the highest honor of the American Association of Public...

October 16, 2006

Handicapping the House: Part I

With the addition of House race data to Pollster.com, it is a good time to talk about the difficulty of measuring the status of the race to control Congress at the district level. Political polling is always subject to a...

September 26, 2006

How Many Women?

Two recent polls provide case studies in how pollsters determine the demographics of "likely voters," especially the gender breakdown. The answer is not as simple as you might imagine, although when it comes to gender, some public pollsters show a...

September 07, 2006

About those Majority Watch Congressional District Polls...

The big news yesterday for true political junkies was the release of separate polls conducted simultaneously in 27 of the most competitive districts nationwide (with surveys in three more districts ongoing) using an automated recorded voice rather than live interviewers....

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