The other day I was doing some work in the early evening and I received a call from a group purporting to be an independent political polling firm, and they asked if I minded participating in their survey of the MN electorate. I was somewhat surprised because we just finished the silly season of political gamesmanship a couple of months ago, but OK, I agreed to participate in the poll.
Question 1: Are you a registered voter? OK, yes I am.
Question 2: Do you consider yourself a Republican, Democrat, or Independent. Independent.
I'd like to ask your opinion about some issues:
Question 3: An agree-disagree flash-point ideological test issue for one of the political parties. In the interests of protecting the guilty I won't identify which party.
Question 4: Second agree-disagree flash-point ideological test issue for the same political party.
Question 5: My last question is... and we get the 3rd ideological test for the same party,
Now I answered all of the questions with my opinions, and told the interviewer that their poll had zero validity simply because (a) questions 3-5 were leading and (b) a blind pig could figure out the political affiliation of the person or organization that was sponsoring the poll. I suspect that a certain state senator was the sponsor.
Which gets me to the point of this blog post. The data from that little study will have no validity whatsoever as a gauge of measuring the interests of the citizenry. It might be able to get a decent percentage indicator of the "party faithful" in a given geographic area. But in terms of helping to understand the issues that are important to the public at this point in time, it is worthless. And no amount of analytics will help overcome the fact that the data are fundamentally garbage.
Question 1: Are you a registered voter? OK, yes I am.
Question 2: Do you consider yourself a Republican, Democrat, or Independent. Independent.
I'd like to ask your opinion about some issues:
Question 3: An agree-disagree flash-point ideological test issue for one of the political parties. In the interests of protecting the guilty I won't identify which party.
Question 4: Second agree-disagree flash-point ideological test issue for the same political party.
Question 5: My last question is... and we get the 3rd ideological test for the same party,
Now I answered all of the questions with my opinions, and told the interviewer that their poll had zero validity simply because (a) questions 3-5 were leading and (b) a blind pig could figure out the political affiliation of the person or organization that was sponsoring the poll. I suspect that a certain state senator was the sponsor.
Which gets me to the point of this blog post. The data from that little study will have no validity whatsoever as a gauge of measuring the interests of the citizenry. It might be able to get a decent percentage indicator of the "party faithful" in a given geographic area. But in terms of helping to understand the issues that are important to the public at this point in time, it is worthless. And no amount of analytics will help overcome the fact that the data are fundamentally garbage.
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