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posted by janrinok on Monday June 22 2015, @08:00PM   Printer-friendly
from the little-more-than-guesswork dept.

Cliff Zukin writes in the NY Times that those paying close attention to the 2016 election should exercise caution as they read the polls because election polling is in near crisis as statisticians say polls are becoming less reliable. According to Zukin, two trends are driving the increasing unreliability of election and other polling in the United States: the growth of cellphones and the decline in people willing to answer surveys. Coupled, they have made high-quality research much more expensive to do, so there is less of it. This has opened the door for less scientifically based, less well-tested techniques. To top it off, a perennial election polling problem, how to identify “likely voters,” has become even thornier. Today, a majority of people are difficult or impossible to reach on landline phones. One problem is that the 1991 Telephone Consumer Protection Act has been interpreted by the Federal Communications Commission to prohibit the calling of cellphones through automatic dialers, in which calls are passed to live interviewers only after a person picks up the phone. To complete a 1,000-person survey, it’s not unusual to have to dial more than 20,000 random numbers, most of which do not go to actual working telephone numbers.

The second unsettling trend are rapidly declining response rates, reaching levels once considered unimaginable. In the late 1970s, pollsters considered an 80 percent response rate acceptable but by 2014 the response rate has fallen to 8 percent. "Our old paradigm has broken down, and we haven’t figured out how to replace it," concludes Zukin. "In short, polls and pollsters are going to be less reliable. We may not even know when we’re off base. What this means for 2016 is anybody’s guess."


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  • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 22 2015, @10:55PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 22 2015, @10:55PM (#199631)

    Why would you assume they all lie or are dishonest?

    Not assuming that people gave honest and accurate answers doesn't mean you assume that people are liars, so that's a straw man. Science should be as objective and rigorous as possible. "That would be hard to do." isn't a valid excuse for bad science.

    Asking as few as a thousand people is usually more then enough, decades of public election polling backs this up

    Or perhaps it's just a means of manipulation, even if unintentional.

    I would assume the disagreement is in regards to you being wrong.

    There's your issue.

    I don't really pay attention to *any* of these silly polls or surveys, much like I don't pay attention to the social 'sciences'; they're meaningless garbage.

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  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by looorg on Monday June 22 2015, @11:25PM

    by looorg (578) on Monday June 22 2015, @11:25PM (#199638)

    Science should be as objective and rigorous as possible. "That would be hard to do." isn't a valid excuse for bad science.

    In most cases science tends to be as objective and rigorous as is possible with the limitations given. There is very little free roaming science around that can do whatever it wants beyond the boundaries of time and money. You want or long for some imaginary world of absolutes that just isn't there and probably hasn't been around for aeons. Most scientific fields today relies heavily upon statistics and modelling and not just the social sciences that you seem to have massive trust issues with for some reason. You have clearly singled it out for your distrust while at the same time ignoring the abundance of statistics used in most other fields. Even if you remove the social sciences from the equation most of the hard or real sciences (whatever they are, we clearly don't share definitions) don't follow or adhere to your strict ideals for objectivity, rigor or absolute answers either.

    If you have any suggestion about how to do cheap, instant and accurate polling I'm fairly certain the world or statistics would be eager to hear about them. As with most things time and money does matter.

    I don't really pay attention to *any* of these silly polls or surveys, much like I don't pay attention to the social 'sciences'; they're meaningless garbage.

    So you don't believe in statistics, social sciences and polling. But yet you had to start a conversation about it. You should probably have put that in your first post and it would have been tagged for trolling instead of disagreement. Shame on me for falling into your trap.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 22 2015, @11:43PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 22 2015, @11:43PM (#199651)

      In most cases science tends to be as objective and rigorous as is possible with the limitations given.

      When the accuracy is questionable, the study should say as much. People simply shouldn't assume things to be true just because it would be difficult to investigate much further. The problem is a combination of bad media reporting and, at times, even the ones who conducted the poll are dishonest.

      You want or long for some imaginary world of absolutes that just isn't there and probably hasn't been around for aeons.

      Straw man.

      Most scientific fields today relies heavily upon statistics and modelling and not just the social sciences that you seem to have massive trust issues with for some reason.

      Straw man; statistics isn't the main issue.

      Even if you remove the social sciences from the equation most of the hard or real sciences (whatever they are, we clearly don't share definitions) don't follow or adhere to your strict ideals for objectivity, rigor or absolute answers either.

      They adhere to the ideal far better, however. And no one is talking about absolutes except you.

      The main issues with the social 'sciences' is that they usually deal with extremely subjective issues that are almost impossible to verify or investigate. But that doesn't stop the media or many social scientists from claiming that the results of the studies are objective and highly accurate. That doesn't stop researchers from reaching arbitrary conclusions based on data about subjective matters (i.e. porn makes people callous towards women). If the researchers are honest about the limitations of their studies, then that is a good first step. But I won't call current standards good simply because we don't know of a better way to investigate these issues; that's nonsensical.

      If you have any suggestion about how to do cheap, instant and accurate polling

      That it would be hard to do it better is not a reason to call current methods good, if that is what you're saying. Do you understand that logic?

      So you don't believe in statistics, social sciences and polling. But yet you had to start a conversation about it. You should probably have put that in your first post and it would have been tagged for trolling instead of disagreement.

      Ah, I see. Not accepting the social 'sciences' because of their obvious problems and limitations [arachnoid.com] is "trolling" somehow. Does anyone even know what a troll is anymore?

      Fine, if we're going to play that game, then I say you're trolling because no one can seriously believe that the social 'sciences' are all that credible. Your move.