Word: questioned
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Equally tricky is the effect of the pollster's questions. A vaguely worded or blatantly biased question can alter the results by 10% to 40%. A sound question gives the respondent a real choice: "Do you favor or oppose President Johnson's bombing pause...
...deal with the double problem of indecision and hidden prejudice, Gallup has voters mark secret ballots and deposit them in sealed boxes in the last few polls just before election day. The ballot obliges them to make a choice. Equally helpful is the new "intensity question." Using a scale ranging from plus 5 to minus 5, pollsters ask voters to indicate how strongly they feel about candidates and issues. Plus 5 indicates a firm attachment to a candidate; plus 1 suggests that the voter might well swing to the other side. Even in very close contests, pollsters can usually spot...
...same, no one should assume that all polls are created equal. They vary widely in reliability. For that reason, poll readers should ask five basic questions: Who sponsored the poll? What pollster conducted it? When and where was it conducted? How big was the sample? Was the question objective or suggestive...
...floating population on street corners and in bars, tending to overlook housewives, elderly people and stay-at-homes. The best polls are those conducted by established, well-known polling organizations that regularly publish results. Even these may be suspect if the sample was less than 1,000, the question is unstated, and the poll was taken more than two weeks before publication...
...question that pols put to their pollsters is not "Who's going to win?" but "What's bugging the voters?" Polls help candidates to identify their own negatives, and then change those characteristics that voters find unattractive. Taking advice from their pollsters, California Democratic Chief Jesse Unruh peeled off 90 lbs. to reshape his corpulent boss image, and Pennsylvania Democrat Milton Shapp discarded his maroon socks (but lost the 1966 gubernatorial race anyway). Candidates also use private polls to find out where the large and decisive mass of swing voters is located, and then concentrate their campaigning...