PushPullAndPollVille
And guess who's bringing it to us?
David Akin has the (very, very well researched) story:
The poll (of potential voters in the by-election riding of Guelph) was done by a firm whose principal happens to be the brother of a Conservative MP. The firm, KlrVu-Research of Winnipeg, is headed by Allan Bruinooge, the older brother of Rod Bruinooge, a first-term Conservative MP who scored one of the biggest upsets of the 2006 election, taking out Liberal cabinet minister Reg Alcock......
{snippety-doo-dah}
The big guys -- Ipsos-Reid, Decima and so on -- use real people and telephones to call you up and ask a few 'screening' questions to make sure you're a qualified voter. The phone numbers are drawn randomly from a geographic area but pollsters do some additional weeding to balance for gender, income levels, and other qualifiers to make they get a random sample. Typically, the big-name pollsters will make thousands of phone calls to be able to report the opinions of about 1,000 Canadians, which they claim will be a representative sample. The big firms will qualify their results by saying that the results are accurate to within three percentage points, 19 times out of 20.
Klr-Vu, on the other hand, does not use human beings to do its polling: It uses software. Here is Klr-Vu's own words:
This KLRVU poll was conducted by touchtone technology which polled households across Guelph. Using this technology with the voice of a professional announcer all respondents heard the questions asked identically, which queried a response on the candidate's name and their associated party. In theory, with the stated sample size, one can say with 95% certainty that the results would not vary by more than the stated margin of sampling error, in one direction or the other. There are other possible sources of error in all surveys that may be more serious than theoretical calculations of sampling error. These include refusals to be interviewed, question wording and question order, weighting by demographic control data and the manner in which respondents are filtered (such as, determining who is a likely participant). It is difficult to quantify the errors that may result from these factors.
So, essentially, a digital voice -- software -- posed the questions and respondents registered their preferences by pressing a button a telephone. Critics say this technique does not appropriately screen for non-voters and is prone to errors.
It is also prone to abuse, as Americans found out during the last congressional election cycle, particularly when it is used for the dubious practice known as 'push' polling.
Which makes one wonder if it is possible for the folks behind robo-calling to capitalize on the potential for both errors and abuse to generate 'magical' numbers.
Like, say, the number 'fifty-six'.
Which, coincidentally or not, is precisely the number of Canadians, in percent, that the Robo-Callers with the ties to the Can-Cons say are 'opposed' to Henry Morgentaler's Order of Canada.
Which, it turns out, when compared with the numbers generated by other pollsters using more 'conventional' methodology, doesn't look so magical after all.
Again, from Mr. Akin's post:
Ipsos-Reid, the polling firm used by Canwest News Service whose methodology is similar to Nanos Research, also polled on the Morgentaler issue and got a completely different result. Ipsos-Reid asked 1,023 Canadians between July 4-7 about the suitability of Morgentaler to receive the Order of Canada and found that 65 per cent were OK with it. The Toronto Star asked its pollster, Angus Reid Strategies, to poll on the Morgentaler question. Angus Reid found that 60 per cent of Canadians were OK with the Morgentaler award.
In other words, that not so magical 'fifty-six' appears to be little more than unadulterated codswallop.
OK?
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Original link sources: Red Tory and Where'd That Bug Go?
Originally clear-eyed leg-work: JJ and Buckets
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