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Forgetting People:  What’s Wrong with Public Opinion Research Today, and How to Fix It

By Steve Farkas

Today’s public opinion researchers are grappling with serious challenges facing their profession—declining response rates, cell phones, push polls, inappropriate use of internet surveys. While they are very right to be concerned about threats to quality, their focus is misplaced. The biggest menace facing this industry is not borne of response rates or the challenges of technology. The real problem is with the very quality of our surveys—the questions we ask, how we describe results, and how we allow results to be used. Full article...

A perennial complaint we hear about public opinion is that you can’t trust what people tell you because they’re constantly changing their minds and because they hold conflicting attitudes. Our best answer is this quote from the great historian Jacques Barzun:

“A contradiction kills its opposite; inconsistencies exist side-by-side, in response to different situations. How could an unbending self survive in a variable world? In winter, hot soup; in summer, cool drink.”

Jacques Barzun
From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life, 1500 to the Present.

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