Free Republic

Section 5, pages 4-5 of the binding "Memorandum of Understanding" that was negotiated and agreed upon by both political campaigns states:

"No props, notes, charts, diagrams, or other writings or other tangible things may be brought into the debate by either candidate.... Each candidate must submit to the staff of the Commission prior to the debate all such paper and any pens or pencils with which a candidate may wish to take notes during the debate, and the staff or commission will place such paper, pens and pencils on the podium..."

The only thing that absolutely has to be done is to weight back to the population as a whole, when looking at the total column, if you over or under sample certain groups.

Yes, focus group recruiting is the worst. There are a lot of short cuts taken. I quit bidding on those contracts, because I couldn't do it right and compete on price with those who would cut corners.

Wow!

You just made me feel a whole lot better about this poll.

How quickly did they conduct this poll? There is a lot of pressure on interviewers to get completes. This is especially true, when the poll has to be done quickly.

A scenario where the interviewer puts the respondent in the poll, whether they say they were registered on not, is not hard to believe. I've seen it.

A percentage of the calls are supposed to be monitored by the shift supervisor, but time pressures lead to problems with the results. That's a fact of life in the research business.

It is not uncommon to set quotas for certain demographic groups that don't necessarily represent the poplulation as a whole. This is done, so the groups can be compared to one another. The reason this is done is so the numbers in each comparison group are sufficiently large enough to allow statistically significant comparisons.

In order to extrapolate the data to the population as a whole, each record (respondent) is weighted up or down to reflect the respondents actual proportion of the entire population, using census data.

For example, if I set a quota of 100 women and 100 men, and the actual proportion of the population is not 50/50, but 60/40, women respondents would be weighted 1.2 and men would be weighted .8.

When analyzing the data, and comparing women to men, the data is left unweighted. When looking at the entire population, the weights are applied.

That being said, I don't trust polls by Newsweak. Polls are controlled by the people that pay for them.

Their methodology, if applied correctly, appears to be sound, however.

I nominate Buckhead (Post 47) for Freeper of the Year!

You're welcome. I haven't done any political polls for years. I've been polling for radio staions. They poll every week :-) I wondered about the same thing, but I don't know.

I'm betting that it did and will have some effect. The way the Republican convention gave 911 a major role leads me to believe that 911 did and will be effecting voter identification with Republicans.

I'm sorry that I missed that. Random sampling is the best method, but 'refusal bias' is a difficult problem to over come.

I lost all respect for Zogby, when I say the way he worded the Presidential approval question. There was no middle ground. So, respondents that said the President was doing average or okay, were grouped with the negative responses. Leaving a middle ground in a rating question is Marketing Research 101. I can only be left with the opinion that he did it purposely to reduce President Bush's approval.

There is far too much self selection bias in Internet polls, even when getting respondents by emailing them, to rely on them.

First, there is only one good reason to purposely over sample a certain group. I stated that reason, in my first post.

You raise a good question. You can base the 'control number' to weight back to through known data (voter registration information, census data, etc.). You could use a truly random survey of the poputlation. That's not easy, due to refusal bias. Or, you could use a combination of the above.

Known data and census information are dated sources, so a shift in partisan allegience, wouldn't be accounted for.

In my humble opinion, a random sample of the population would be the best way to account for such a shift. Surveys done for the government, usually by colleges, really do a good job of getting the refusal bias out of a survey. They use methods that are cost prohibitive to the private sector, but the government doesn't seem to mind :-)

Polling is not a perfect science. This is especially true with political polls, because likely voters can fluctuate significanly, as voting day approaches. Plus, they are self selected. More people tend to say they are likely to vote, than actually do vote.

Any time you have to weight, you reduce the accuracy of the poll. If they is a major change in the information you are using to weight the data back to, that isn't accounted for, you're in trouble.

In political polls, I look for trends, instead of 'so and so is up by X percent'. I'm liking the trend, right now.

There are two major issues, when weighting. Is the sample frame a random sample, or , were certain groups over sampled, in order to get enough respondents in each group, so that they can be compared?

If you take a random sample, people who refuse to be interviewed can skew the results. This is only a problem, if the people who refuse are significantly different from the people who agreed to be surveyed.

For example, if young people refuse at a higher rate than older people, the younger respondents need to be weighted up to compensate. If younger and older people refuse at the same rate, you don't need to weight the results.

These decisions are generally based on known demographic data. It's not a perfect system, but it does a pretty good job. The key is to reduce the refusal rate, by putting your best interviewers on 'refusal conversions', etc., and get the refusal rates down.

If you over sample certain groups, when looking at the sample universe in total, the groups need to be weighted back to the population. If you randomly survey a population that would result in a very small sample size of Group A and a large sample size of Group B, you have to over sample Group A, in order to get a large enough sample of Group A to be able to compare it to Group B. When looking at the total, you weight Group A down and Group A up.

If these latest polls appear to be over sampling Republicans, there could be an innocent explanation.

Say that you take a random sample. You then ask party affiliation and how likely the respondent is to vote. If you are surveying likely voters, respondents not likely to vote are not eligible.

More Republicans than Democrats could get into this survey, based on how likely these groups are to vote. I wouldn't find this odd, during and immediately after the Republican convention.

That being said, the people that pay for the poll have control over everything. So, keep that in mind, when looking at the results. Pollsters are independent in the same way that 'independent auditors' that audit the public companies that pay for the audit are independent. Arther Anderson comes to mind.

Polls work. People would stop paying me to conduct them, if they didn't work.

An over sampling of one party over the other, in a poll of likely voters, doesn't raise a red flag for me. A poll paid for by Time or Newsweek is a bigger concern to me.

I watch the reactions of the politicians. Kerry's recent gyrations lead me to believe the President Bush got a pretty big bounce out of the convention. And, that's a good thing.

Once again, you don't know me. You have no idea who my idols are.

You clearly have made up your mind, regardless of the facts.

Discussing this with you is an exercise in futility.

I'm done.

That's a pretty broad statement for someone who doesn't even know me.

Try to take a look at the know facts. It's becoming clearer every day that this Bryant is being falsely accused of a terrible crime.

Not only is this girl putting his life on the line, she is putting the cases of REAL rape victims in jeopardy.

A family member of mine was raped a few years ago.

Don't you dare tell me that I would put a sports idol over a rape victim!

She has sex with another man hours after she was supposed to have been raped. It was most likely with the star witness for the procecution. She lied to the police about it.

The first person to see her (not the procecutions star witness) said she looked fine and used her job as a dating service.

Are you beginning to get the picture?

The girl should go to jail. She put a mans life on the line (life in prison).

That's right. Plus, he got 25 judges that he wanted.

The Dumbocrats have 'misunderestimated' President Bush, once again.

President Bush is smarter than the Dumbocrats, but they are too vain to realize it.

That sounds appropriate.

France and Spain come to mind, as well.

The Spurs should stop whining and start playing. I thought their coach was going to cry.

I don't know, yet. But, I do know that I won't be voting for a DemoRat.

I don't see any war crime here, just a dead man who was trying to kill our boys.

Don't mess with the Marines, and you won't get killed.