Speaking of, how does your in-house polling stack up?
Today Salon published a piece about a flawed polling procedure ad what it could mean for the November election. Because the majority of pollsters only place calls to landline phones, the article argues, key demographics are being under-represented:
“…(a) sample that’s predominantly under 40 years of age (oops, that one favors Obama); disproportionately renters rather than homeowners (Obama-leaning again); full of college students (sounds like a Starbucks Obama thing to me) — and, for good measure, includes a higher proportion of blacks and Hispanics than the national population does.”
Seems like a pretty boneheaded move. But I have a hunch many newspaper companies are making the same mistake, skewing our research and leading us to make poorly-informed decisions based on false majorities.
I’d be curious to hear what people learn if they actually go take a look at internal research. I’ll kick it off: Gannett uses landline phones only for the massive readership surveys conducted for all papers.
This entry was posted on Monday, July 14th, 2008 at 8:58 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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