Public Opinion Polls Assignment

Answer the following questions:

1. Why are polls conducted?

Polls are conducted in order to provide the best direct source of information about the public
opinion.

2. What makes them reliable?

These polls are well conducted and get an accurate measure of the population.

3. How can respondents be interviewed? Is one way more reliable than the others?

A respondent interview can either be structured or unstructured. A structured interview is

similar to a questionnaire for data collection. An unstructured interview is an interview in which
the questions are not prearranged and is usually the opposite of a structured interview.
Structured interviews are better because they are up to twice as effective at predicting job
performance than unstructured ones.

4. How reliable are polls conducted on the internet?

Online polls are no less reliable than traditional polls but sometimes poor response rates for
phone calls can lead to systemic bias.

5. What does it mean for a poll to have an error margin?

The margin of error is a statistic expressing the amount of random sampling error in the results
of the survey. The larger the margin of error the less confidence one should have that a poll
would reflect the result of a survey of the entire population

6. What other factors can skew polls results?

The margin of sampling error is just one source of inaccuracy in a poll. Other factors such as
vague or confused questions and question order can skew poll results.