Happy4th of July, Americans. 26 percent of you don't know what country from which we declared our independence according to this new poll.
This 26% includes one-fifth who are unsure and 6% who thought the U.S. separated from another nation. That begs the question, “From where do the latter think the U.S. achieved its independence?” Among the countries mentioned are France, China, Japan, Mexico, and Spain.
I can only do so much, checked out parents. Start giving a shit about the basics. Meanwhile, can we have high stakes testing for civics and history now? Pretty please?
3 comments:
There was a poll in Russia just the other day where 8% of Russians believed their team would win the World Cup.
The Russians failed to qualify for the World Cup.
Perhaps people should stop calling polling a science and consign it to the ranks of phone-in fortune telling.
Juris, how does your example of the ignorance of some segment of the Russian people's state of knowledge have any bearing on the accuracy of polling in general?
My take on that result is that the 8% who thought Russia would win the World Cup is that they are elderly women who do not follow sports, but automatically assume that Russia will win any international contest in sports because they have been drilled to respond in that fashion since the days of Stalin.
The real problem with even the best polling is that it is a instantaneous snapshot of public opinion, which is notoriously fickle and uninformed. Most people don't want to be bothered to answer a poll, and therefore anyone who does is a self-selected segment of the population. The results probably contain a greater percentage of uninformed people who are flattered that someone would ask them a question than people who actually know something but are too busy to respond or don't want to waste their time on pointless polls.
People also don't trust pollsters in general because so many polls (especially political ones) are conducted by interested parties who have an ax to grind or construct the questions in such a way as to obtain the desired result.
That doesn't mean that all polls are invalid. It just means that bad polls are invalid.
I will not trust a poll unless I can see the text of the actual questions asked of the respondents and the exact counts on how they answered. Without that information, the reader cannot tell whether the pollsters rigged the questions to obtain the desired result with inflammatory or prejudicial language. Which is what political pollsters do to make their candidates or issues do better ("push polling").
I will not trust a poll unless I can see the text of the actual questions asked of the respondents and the exact counts on how they answered.
Even then, that doesn't surmount some of the obstacles you noted.
I don't ever answer telephone polls, but if I did, I would probably be inclined to fuck with them, at least a little, if not a lot.
That polling so often produces such idiotic results ought to call into question the practice. Even more, it should put many grains of salt onto the palate of whoever is consuming the results - particularly when trumpeting one and discounting another. Yet rarely do you see such perspective on the part of some partisan hack claiming how such-and-such poll validates their ideology.
Post a Comment