Zogby PollFollow

I just got phone polled by Zogby's. They asked me the expected questions: How much do I think Bush sucks, Do I think Bush is an Asshat, and do I prefer Jesusland or the Untied Christian States of America as the new name for our great country?

Zogby's also asked a few unexpected questions, apparently the Alaskan oil drilling thing is still up in the air and some in congress want to budget for it although the drilling itself has not been approved. The question to that one was do I think it is forward thinking or a backdoor attempt to get around congress to budget for the drilling. They also, of course, asked if I thought drilling in Alaska is a good idea at all despite repeated warnings by everyone and their mother that it won’t lower oil prices and domestic consumers would not see any oil from the area for more than ten years.

The other unexpected question was whether I believed a single global currency would be a good thing for the U.S. and the world or not. This one really threw me. The way the question was worded led me to believe it would be a good thing because it would raise the standard of living world wide for various reasons I can't remember well enough to write down here. My thinking on that would be that in order for the third world's standard of living to raise even a slight bit the U.S. and other first world countries would have to let their standards of living drop considerably but the very idea would also drive varrass insane so I had to pause and think for a moment before answering.

So anyone else get polled?

Oil drilling in Alaska is a very bad idea. And a world currency? That's insane, nobody would dare put their name on that measure. Australia, maybe.

And people wonder why I always question poll results...

If the way a question is worded implies *anything* to you about the issue, then the poll results are going to be tainted and meaningless (except perhaps to whomever paid for the poll and slanted the question in the first place).

sigh...

As I've said many times before, no one is claiming that polling is perfect. It's just better than any other means of determining public opinion than any other we have at your disposal. When you come up with the perfect method of getting public opinion, let someone know.

I've been on Zogby's all thru the election cycle but never seem to get the phone-polls. Instead they usually send me their e-mail polls, I receieved that last one around Thanksgiving.
The poll was also a bunch of questions about Jesusland and how I felt about the environment, but none about the world currency.
Maybe one of these days I'll actually get to do one of their phone polls, after all I did give them my phone# for it.

I'm no Negrodamus, but I certainly hope that crows haven't been extinct-ed in that distant future so you can eat your fill.

FTFY

Sure. There's no "perfect" method, but there are ways that are "less flawed" then some polling methods out there. For starters, there are certainly ways of phrasing questions that bias the answers, and ways that dont. Additionally, what options you give the person for answers can bias the results as well.

I recall a zogby poll just prior to the election which someone used as justification for people caring about the economy more then the war on terror. When I examined the poll methodology though, it turned out that zogby loaded the answers to make it look that way (intentional or not, that was the result since the results were being used to justify the idea that economy was the most important issue).

In this case, they'd asked people what they considered the most important thing, but split war on terror issues into four different catagories (war in Afghanistan, war in Iraq, Homeland security, and a nebulous "foreign affairs"). When you added the four up, they totalled more then the single "economy" answer. Even after pointing this out, several people were still of the opinion that the economy mattered more to voters then anything else.

That's just one example, but you can see bias in almost every poll. Some more then others. Zogby is really bad about this from what I've seen...

Reading comprehension? ANWR.org says that the Arctic Reserve is doing just fine and that oil development would have very minimal, almost negligible, impact. Raving lunatics, indeed.