Phone polling depends on a set of assumptions: "You're at home; you have a phone; your phone has a hard-coded area code and exchange which means I know where you are; ... you're waiting for your phone to ring; when it rings you'll answer it; it's OK for me to interrupt you; you're happy to talk to me; whatever you're doing is less important than talking to me; and I won't take no for an answer -- I'm going to keep calling back until you talk to me."Here is the world most of us live in:
However, the reality is much different: "In fact, you don't have a home phone; your number can ring anywhere in the world; you're not waiting for your phone to ring; nobody calls you on the phone anyway they text you or IM you; when your phone rings you don't answer it -- your time is precious, you have competing interests, you resent calls from strangers, you're on one or more do-not-call lists, and 20 minutes [the length of many pollsters' interviews] is an eternity."Not to mention how the question is framed, the validity of modern polling is over. Plus, where people spend most of their time, online, is just too hard to poll because of the anonymity and the ability to rig the results [Stephen Colbert knows a thing or two about that, *wink*].
So with landlines being the traditional means and cell phones, text messaging and IM the unused new means, any model without all these factors is pretty useless.
As Jay Leve, founder of SurveyUSA, says, "If you look at where we are here in 2009, it's over... this is the end. Something else has got to come along."
Just like the MSM's decline, people will have to piece together aggregates from sources around the web to form their own "average" opinion.
Source: Political Wire
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