Word: polling
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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There have also been instances of politicians commissioning private polls of limited samples and leaking the results to the press as if it were a national poll. By adjusting the sample it is, of course, possible to obtain any desired results. In recent campaigns, major candidates have frequently commissioned polls on certain issues, using the data to mold a popular campaign image of themselves. This sort of molding is, obviously, what politicians have always done; but it may not be in the interest of better leadership that they have an instrument as fine as the polls to help them...
Louis Harris, America's other leading public pollster, has added his own innovation to this technique. In each consecutive poll his organization interviews many of the same people over again in an effort to get a more consistent picture of shifting trends...
...main check on accuracy is competition. No one would consider faking a poll because it would immediately be challenged by the others. Pollsters want to be accurate--that's how they make their money...
...POLLS are used in more sophisticated ways, new problems arise. It is difficult to accurately determine responses to issues of a complicated nature. This October the New York Times commissioned the Gallup organization to do a poll on various aspects of living conditions in Harlem. There were some 86 questions of a rather personal nature and the interviewers had a great deal of trouble getting answers...
...When the poll was completed, a Times editor sent a reporter to a few of the addresses polled to get some direct quotes and discovered that the buildings didn't exist. Gallup scrapped the poll when he was told, and explained that because only black interviewers could be used it had been necessary to hire some people who were not on the regular staff. Two of these had falsified their data. Gallup explained that one of the primary means of checking interviews--spot checks by telephone--had been ineffective because there are so few phones in Harlem. He didn...