Another Online Poll on Online Activity
August 22, 2006
Last week's "Numbers Guy" column by Carl Bialik of the Wall Street Journal Online looked at another online survey about an online activity, in this case about online alcohol sales to teenagers. Bialik noticed something in the release that the...[More...]
Corrections!: An AMA Spring Break Update
June 1, 2006
We have had some new developments over the last few days regarding the online Spring Break study conducted earlier this year by the American Medical Association (AMA). The story, as long time readers will recall, involved an AMA release that...[More...]
An Online Poll on an Online Activity
April 26, 2006
One of the gratifying things about writing this blog is the collective power of Mystery Pollster readers. Last week, I emailed some questions to Zogby International about the methodology they used for a recent poll conducted on behalf of the...[More...]
The AMA Spring Break Survey - Part I
March 28, 2006
Last week, MP discussed a not-quite projective study of evacuees from Hurricane Katrina published by the New York Times. I noted the effort made by the Times to differentiate their study from a "scientific poll" and to make clear that...[More...]
Gallup & The Samplemiser
February 15, 2006
The latest poll release from Gallup includes what appears to be a new approach for reporting their data on the job approval rating of President George Bush. They include a "three-poll rolling average" as a "smoothed approval estimate" based on...[More...]
Not Such An Outlier After All?
December 19, 2005
The Diageo/Hotline Poll...(story, press release, full results) shows a very different result for the Bush job rating: 50% approve, 47% disapprove. Is this, as our friend Professor Franklin asks, "a fluke or a harbinger?" MP guesses it's the former (and...[More...]
Outliers Happen
December 18, 2005
Two new national surveys released late last week add yet another wrinkle to the question of whether the approval ratings of President Bush are on the rise since late October, because they are at once very similar in methodology and...[More...]
Getting Past the Noise: Bush Slide Continues
October 18, 2005
The release of new results from six major public pollsters over the last two weeks provides a great opportunity to learn something about both the limitations of survey research and about its power. Most political surveys are based on random...[More...]
Bush Job Approval Up?
September 30, 2005
Let's continue to obsess over the recent variation on the job approval rating of President George W. Bush and maybe learn something about sampling error in the process. Two new polls released in the last 24 hours, one by CNN/USAToday/Gallup...[More...]
On Outliers and Party ID
February 18, 2005
Last week, the Gallup organization released a survey sponsored by CNN and USAToday, fielded February 4-6, that appeared to show a surge in President Bush's job approval rating from 51% to 57% since mid-January. "The Iraqi elections...produced a bump in...[More...]
