Today I accepted an invitation to contribute to the "Outside Voices" feature on the CBS News blog "Public Eye." My post — about lessons learned from the conflicting NSA telephone records polls — is now up. Here’s my bottom line:
The lesson we could all stand to learn here is that on issues of public
policy no single question provides a precise, “scientific” measure of
the truth. The most accurate read of public opinion usually comes from
comparing the sometimes conflicting results of many different questions
on many different polls and understanding the reasons for those
differences.
Check it out. You might want to click thru just to see the non-mysterious photo.
Mark Blumenthal is the principal at MysteryPollster, LLC. With decades of experience in polling using traditional and innovative online methods, he is uniquely positioned to advise survey researchers, progressive organizations and candidates and the public at-large on how to adapt to polling’s ongoing reinvention. He was previously head of election polling at SurveyMonkey, senior polling editor for The Huffington Post, co-founder of Pollster.com and a long-time campaign consultant who conducted and analyzed political polls and focus groups for Democratic party candidates.
1 thought on “MP on NSA Polls on CBS Public Eye”
I liked your discussion on the Public Eye blog, but I am not so sure about your final example based on Q17 and Q18 of the CBS News poll. I assume it is supposed to be an example of one question emphasizing the rationale of investigating terrorism and one question emphasizing the invasion of privacy, but where the underlying policies are substantially the same in both questions. Yet in Q17 the policy is the blanket monitoring of all Americans “on a regular basis.” In Q18, however, the policy is the monitoring of particular people of whom the government is suspicious. Although the first 27 words are the same in both questions, the substantive difference between these two policies is huge. One involves particularized suspicion. The other does not. Hence, this example is arguably a better one in favor of “underlying true attitudes” explaining the different results than conflicting Zaller-esque “considerations” (or a “conflicting mosaic of more general attitudes”). Nevertheless, I agree with your general argument.
I liked your discussion on the Public Eye blog, but I am not so sure about your final example based on Q17 and Q18 of the CBS News poll. I assume it is supposed to be an example of one question emphasizing the rationale of investigating terrorism and one question emphasizing the invasion of privacy, but where the underlying policies are substantially the same in both questions. Yet in Q17 the policy is the blanket monitoring of all Americans “on a regular basis.” In Q18, however, the policy is the monitoring of particular people of whom the government is suspicious. Although the first 27 words are the same in both questions, the substantive difference between these two policies is huge. One involves particularized suspicion. The other does not. Hence, this example is arguably a better one in favor of “underlying true attitudes” explaining the different results than conflicting Zaller-esque “considerations” (or a “conflicting mosaic of more general attitudes”). Nevertheless, I agree with your general argument.