Is Public Opinion Truly the Opinion of the Public?

The Trump administration has released its plan regarding immigration in the United States, eliminating the Visa Lottery System, providing a pathway to citizenship for those registered in the DACA program, and requesting $25 billion to go towards building a border wall with Mexico. As support for these measures, the Trump administration cited a recent Harvard-Harris poll that indicated that 80% of Americans were in favor of closing the borders with Mexico. However, in a recent article NPR has called into question the accuracy of these results and has highlighted the inherent qualities of polls and surveys that may result in inaccurate conclusions. The biggest contention with this specific poll was in the way the questions were worded, suggesting that the questions may have been leading in some way or phrased such that participants were unknowingly persuaded into choosing the perceived socially acceptable or morally righteous choice.

What the NPR article did not address was that Harvard-Harris used an online survey to poll participants, something that is often a much larger issue facing surveys and polls than the nature of the questions themselves. The use of the Internet as tool for polling has become the most popular choice because it is inexpensive and allows researchers to economically reach a broad audience. However, this particular approach suffers from an inability to reach those respondents without access to a computer or high speed Internet, which unfortunately consists primarily of lower income and less educated individuals. Conditions are only worsened as people find new ways of circumventing the polling system as they gain agency regarding how and when they can be contacted (Pew Research Center). This, in addition to declining response rates from telephone polling and surveys in general, is increasing the challenges of accurately identifying public opinion on important issues, which government officials rely upon in order to effectively conduct public policy.

The results of these failures and inaccuracies in polling today are adversely affecting the way our government enacts policy. The explosion of social media platforms and usage has not, ironically, resulted in a greater level of accurate communication of public opinion. With increasing levels of political polarization and general distrust of government, it is imperative that these challenges are overcome.

Sources

https://www.npr.org/2018/01/23/580037717/what-the-latest-immigration-polls-do-and-dont-say

http://www.pewresearch.org/methodology/u-s-survey-research/collecting-survey-data/

Graph: http://www.pewresearch.org/2017/05/15/what-low-response-rates-mean-for-telephone-surveys/

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3 Responses to "Is Public Opinion Truly the Opinion of the Public?"

Virginia Myers says:

February 27, 2018 at 8:29 pm

Dear Hannah,

Thank you for your reflection about public opinion and polls. Today’s class discussion directly correlates to your blog post as we talked in depth about the overall goal of a survey: to make sure the people in the sample are representative of the population to which we are trying to make a statement about. More specifically, we spoke about how it is important that the interviews of a survey are systematic so that it has a control (i.e., the way the interviewer asks the question could dictate how the respondent answers) and interviews need to be conducted by trained professionals (because they will not skew the results or bias respondents towards certain answers). After reading the NPR article you attached, it’s evident that the polls regarding immigration were skewed because of the way the interviewers asked the question. For example, the poll asked Americans, “Do you think we should have basically open borders or do you think we need secure borders?” The author responds to the wording of this question: “Given the choice between “open borders – a position that no mainstream political leaders are proposing – and a “secure border,” which is current U.S. policy 79% of Americans agreed that the U.S. needs “secure borders.” Furthermore, the poll was clearly skewed as the interview or person conducting the poll wanted respondents to produce specific outcomes. This is why it is important to understand who conducted the poll and who is relaying the statistics and results – do they have any specific motives or beliefs they are trying to support and express to the public?

Later in your post, you talk about the limitations of using an online survey. Since the poll was online, it may mean that respondents were wealthier because they owned a computer and had access to the Internet. This could have skewed the results because those respondents could have been more representative of the Republican party (and the Republican party tends to be more in favor of the Mexican border). Instead, perhaps Harvard-Harris could have conducted face-to-face interviews with people from different backgrounds, including race, demographic, geographic location, social class, age, religion, etc. to ensure that the results represented the entire population’s perspective on immigration. However, face-to-face interviews are expensive and timely, so, there is always a trade-off between what you want to do and what you can actually do. Overall, a proper solution to this poll would be to reword the questions to eliminate biases. Until taking this class, I did not realize how inaccurate polls could be, and the media is not explicit in expressing this notion. It is our job to be informed citizens to understand that and do our research before making conclusions from polls.
Chloe Blond says:

February 28, 2018 at 10:46 am

Hannah,

I found your blog post highlighting the inaccuracies in polling to be very interesting. You mention that the inaccuracies caused by online surveys are often much larger issues than the inaccuracies caused by the nature of the questions themselves. This got me thinking. As the world has and continues to move business online, what will happen to the world of polling? Will the world of polling follow despite the inaccuracies that come with such polling?

I decided to do some research on this topic and found the following information online in two articles (both of which are cited below). People that watch the polls closely have always been the pollsters themselves. As a Forbes article states, pollsters have started to see the industry moving closer to the internet. Lee Mringoff, director of the Marist Institute for Public Opinion, said that there has been an attraction to both the cost saving and quicker aspects of internet polling. Jon Cohen, SurveyMonkey’s Chief Research Officer said that “talking about internet polling in the 2016 election is a dramatically different conversation than a decade ago,” citing the more than 90% of likely voters with an online presence up from just over 50%. According to Jon, internet polling does not seem to have the same coverage issues it once had, and when that is paired with the declining response from telephones, online is the future. The challenge however, lies in doing it well.

A FiveThirtyEight article also discussed online polling in the context of the 2016 presidential election. In previous years, most analysis and reports would have put more weight on the live interview polls or just ignored internet polls all together. Cost analysis thought that live interview polls were more accurate than internet polls which relied on volunteer respondents who might not be fully representative to the population. But with the 2016 election, it was more difficult to ignore internet polls. Not only were 50% of polls conducted over the internet since Trump had entered the race, but media that had previously refused to report on internet based polls were increasingly willing to sponsor internet polls (NBC and New York Times).

In addition to the questions I raised above, it will be interesting to see the presence of internet polling in the next presidential election.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/jordanlebeau/2016/11/07/forget-trump-and-clinton-the-polling-industry-has-a-lot-riding-on-the-election/#22f72ec0905a

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-future-of-polling-may-depend-on-donald-trumps-fate/
Calum Johnson says:

February 28, 2018 at 2:26 pm

Hannah,

This blog post highlights an increasingly concerning matter about polling over the internet, where as our society develops a greater usage of social media, polls will begin to solely rely on online answers. The Washington Post studied different online polls and found that “All surveys exhibited sizable errors — beyond any expected margin of error.” The internet has been seen as a terrible place to get accurate readings of the public opinion. It is much harder to get equal representation of the American Public. The article continued by citing a greater accuracy occurred with using more than just demographics and looking at ideology as well, and also conducting longer online interviews. Even through this, polls are still trying to figure out how to be more accurate online as it offers a more efficient, less costly mode of polling. The internet’s inaccuracy, as well as the ability to skew polls with a choice of interviewees definitely played a part in Harvard-Harris finding that nearly 80% supported closed borders. It is not a good resource for public opinion. The internet can be very useful to polling agencies, but also has a lot of risk in terms of accuracy.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/05/02/has-someone-cracked-the-code-on-making-internet-polls-more-accurate/?utm_term=.7924b3c3bc2b

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