Talk:Opinion poll

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[edit] Added to disambiguation page

I added a link to this article from the disambiguation page for the word "poll." I can't believe no one's ever put it there before now!


[edit] History of Opinion Polls

The first known example of an Opinion poll was a local straw vote. It seems to be very likely that particular types of polling may have existed as far back as the medieval times or even ancient Egyptian eras. Awareness of local mass sentiment and social conscious seems to have an affinity for most types of participatory systematics, ancient and modern in terms of a general consensus.

[edit] Margin of Error

"They are designed to represent the opinions of a population by asking a small number of people a series of questions and then extrapolating the answers to the larger group."

This is one use of opinion polls. The article ignores the use of opinion polls as propaganda eg Bandwagon effect.--harry 17:12, 14 Sep 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Margin of Error

A poll with a random sample of 1000 people has margin of sampling error of 3% for the estimated percentage of the whole population. A 3% margin of error means that 95% of the time the procedure used would give an estimate within 3% of the percentage to be estimated.

Where does this come from? Margin of error should depend not only upon the sample size, but also the population size. If there were exactly 1000 people in the whole population, a sample of 1000 counts them all and and therefore should have no error. If there were 1005 people in the population, maybe the sample missed the 5 people who disagreed with the others, so there should be a small amount of error. And so on. I'd like to remove this part from the article unless someone comes up with a source for it. --zandperl 16:57, 8 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Why not give figures? What is the range of population sizes for which a random sample of 1000 subjects will give a 3% margin of error? I have seen a similar article elsewhere which stated that 1000 respondents, if carefully chosen, could reliably represent the entire US; so it is simply a matter of making the information universally useful. Axel 23:47, 15 October 2005 (UTC)

Details on the margin of error can be found on the margin of error page linked from the article. Duncan Keith 19:11, 16 October 2005 (UTC)

More serious objections... I'm not certain of these, so I'm not making a change to the page, but:

(1) doesn't the margin of error depend on how the people voted? For instance, if 10 people vote for candidate A in the poll (1%), then the uncertainty on candidate A's percentage is certainly not +/- 3%, because he couldn't have 3% less support than 1% (which would be -2%). I believe that the 3% number comes from taking the square root of 1000 and dividing by 1000 (which gives 3.1%), but I think the relevant square root is not of 1000 but of however many votes each candidate gets. If the poll reveals 500 votes for A and 500 for B, then the margin of error on each would be square root of 500 divided by 1000 (2.2%).

(2) If the margin of error is just the square root of the number of votes for a typical candidate, then it would be an estimate of the standard deviation of the sample means. But the 95% number is for 2 standard deviations, not 1. So which is it? Is the margin of error 1 standard error or 2?

The formula for the standard error for a proportion p with sample size n is \sqrt{\frac{p(1-p)}{n}}. In your example we have p=0.01 and n=1000, so the standard error would be \sqrt{\frac{0.01\times{0.99}}{1000}}=0.003=0.3%. As you point out the 95% confidence interval is about ±2 standard errors, giving a value of 0.6% for the 'margin of error'. The 'margin of error' reported by the media is the maximum 95% confidence interval for any possible proportion, and the maximum occurs when p=0.5. Putting this value into the formula with n=1000 and using the slightly more accurate multipler of 1.96 gives a 'margin of error' of
1.96\times\sqrt{\frac{0.5\times{0.5}}{1000}} = 1.96\times\sqrt{\frac{0.25}{1000}} = 1.96\times\frac{1}{\sqrt{4000}} = 0.03 = 3%.
So when the media report 'the margin of error in this poll is 3%' this should be interpreted as 'the 95% confidence interval due to sampling error for any proportion is no more than ±3 percentage points around the reported proportion.' You should also bear in mind that these calculations assume a random sample, and pollsters rarerly use pure random samples. Duncan Keith 11:23, 6 September 2006 (UTC)

[edit] pollpub.com

User 71.108.31.254 has on several occasions added a link to pollpub.com. To me it just seems to be another 'fun web poll' site with no special significance to this topic. I hope that that user or someone else will make the case for it's inclusion on this talk page rather than adding it again without comment, so that we can avoid an edit war. Duncan Keith 12:48, 24 September 2006 (UTC)

[edit] pollpub.com reply

PollPub.com serves as an online resource for any individual that is interested in starting a public or private opinion poll. Why do you feel that this free resource is of "no special significance to this topic" and what interest do you have in determining what resources “make the cut” and which ones do not? Users from every part of the world now have both a tool and an outlet to sample the opinion of many, on whatever topic that they consider relevant. PollPub.com does not attempt to label or judge the content of these polls as “fun” or “significant”, that decision is left to the general public that use this web tool to start polls. The very purpose of a poll is to gather and determine public opinion – we are not here to judge the public or hold them to our own personal set of standards.

We appreciate your effort to maintain the integrity of this wikipedia entry and have no interest in starting an “edit war”, (we never removed links - only replaced ours) but we believe your censorship of a new technological advance in publishing opinion polls is unfair. We are re-inserting this resource and hope that you will reconsider your opinion. In either case, we ask that you please respect our decision to repost as a resource and refrain from starting your “edit war”.

Thank you for replying. Yes, describing pollpub.com as a purveyor of 'fun web polls' was slightly pejorative and for that I apologise; But the fact remains that Wikipedia is supposed to be an encyclopaedia and not just a collection of links. The point is not whether the content of your polls is fun or significant, but whether pollpub.com itself is of any special importance to the 'Opinion poll' topic, and your reply has failed to convince me that it is. If editors followed your advice and never deleted anything then articles would just fill up with spam -- not that I am accusing you of spamming -- and there are hundreds of web poll sites that would consider themselves to be useful resources. You might like to review Wikipedia's policy on advertising, guidleines on notability and particularly point 3 of Links normally to be avoided.
I would like to make a constructive suggestion - as an expert in the field perhaps you could add a section to to the article describing the recent phenomenom of web poll sites and the measures that reputable sites take to avoid producing voodoo polls? In this context a link to pollpub.com as an example of such a site would be entirely relevant. Duncan Keith 16:40, 25 September 2006 (UTC)
In the absence of any further response I have removed the link once again. Duncan Keith 05:21, 10 October 2006 (UTC)

Again we appreciate your suggestions and respect your right to state your opinion. In our opinion, PollPub.com is a valid Opinion Poll resource. We did not feel the need to respond to your repeated posts because we stated previously:

“We appreciate your effort to maintain the integrity of this wikipedia entry and have no interest in starting an “edit war”, “

Please end your “edit war”, and also your “discussion war” because we do not wish to participate in either. Respect our website as an Opinion Poll resource ( and get a life! ).

I am saddened that you do not wish to resolve this dispute by discussion. I woud request that you look again at the pages I referenced above, particularly point 3 of Links normally to be avoided and reconsider your position. Duncan Keith 08:18, 11 October 2006 (UTC)
In giving a third opinion, I think that the link ought to be removed. It borders too much on self-promotion. Furthmore (and honestly), if anything the link should be given as an example in the "Potential of inaccuracy" section, as the polls created are of the most unscientific variety. TJ0513 14:01, 11 October 2006 (UTC)
Fourth opinion: I agree with TJ0513's comments above. --Flex 17:28, 11 October 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Voodoo polls/Online and phone polls

Our article on Voodoo polls, which includes online and phone-in polls, is undersourced. Some editors have objected to the title, so it may be moved to online and phone-in polls, or something similar. If anyone familiar with the topic can add sources or perspective then please help out. ·:· Will Beback ·:· 18:42, 4 September 2007 (UTC)