Gallup Poll contacted me last night.

[longship]

I got to take the poll (goodie!).

It was about how happy I was with my life. (Bleh! Boring stuff.) But, generally, I'm pretty happy.

Then they started asking questions about how happy I was about the country's situation and the country's leadership. There were quite a few of these. Do I have to tell you how I responded?

One of the things I noticed was that there were questions which begged nuanced responses. Unfortunately, the only responses offered were yes and no, or approve and disapprove, etc. There was no "mostly approve" or "mostly disapprove" or "neutral". So there is a flaw in Gallup's phrasing the questions and responses. On several occasions I found myself responding "approve" to the question that was phrased because it was the response that fit the best. I can't help but think that the lack of nuance in the poll would bias the poll in one way or another.

[Name removed]

1. Deleted message

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[imenja]

5. so you'd rather see the Republicans dominate the polls

and skew the results in favor of Bush?

[Name removed]

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[imenja]

13. polls are by nature biased

but it's not hard to figure out how to answer in ways that are bad for Bush and the GOP.

[Name removed]

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[Norquist Nemesis]

6. ROFLMAO!!!! Welcome to the sunny side, Karl!

:rofl: :hi:

[jsamuel]

7. Welcome to the DU Karl Rove!

:bounce: :beer: :hi: :headbang: :yourock: :woohoo: :applause: :patriot:

[jobycom]

8. Welcome aboard, Karl Rove! Glad to have you!

And believe me, those are words I never thought I'd type!

Love the name! :applause: :woohoo:

[Name removed]

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[jobycom]

16. That's okay, I'm not jobycom, either

Well, actually, I am, but not completely.

Karl Rove plays both sides, you know. Back in 2000 while Bush was running, Ken Hatfield wrote a book, Fortunate Son, which declared that Bush had been convicted for possession of cocaine, and given community service. He claimed he had a secret source. BushCo destroyed Ken Hatfield over the book, because he had lied to his publisher over a past crime he had committed. A big crime, too--attempted murder for hire-- so I have mixed sympathies for Hatfield. BushCo never bothered to disprove any claims in the book, they just destroyed the author, as they did over the Dan Rather memo, the Newsweek story, etc. It's a standard Bush/Rove tactic, going way back in Texas history.

Anyway, Hatfield eventually killed himself, because the feds were investigating him and threatening to send him back to prison over trumped-up income tax charges and to take all of his savings and leave his family in debt. Same kind of stuff they did to Julie Hyatt Steele, and are trying to do to Joseph Wilson. Hatfield killed himself rather than face that fate.

But before he died, he revealed his secret source. It was Karl Rove. Rove pretended to him that he had misgivings about Bush, and revealed several secrets--amongst them, the cocaine conviction. When Bush had become governor of Texas, he had his driver's license changed so no one could track down his criminal records (they can be tracked by your DL in Texas, even if they've been taken off your criminal record). But everyone knew there was something in his past he was hiding. Rove came clean on the cocaine conviction. When Hatfield published it, Rove destroyed the rumor by destroying Hatfield.

So he does pretend from time to time to have human morals, and to speak to the other side.

Just lots of words with no purpose. I do that too often. :-)

[Name removed]

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[jobycom]

19. Wow, what happened?

He seemed cool, wish I knew where he flamed out.

[myrna minx]

20. Me too.

I missed the deleted message that he left me. :-( I wanna know what he flamed me about.

[jobycom]

22. It had to be one of us

or something he posted somewhere else. He was polite in this thread, and while I had a little twinge of my Freeper detector, it wasn't very strong. I read his other posts, except the replies to you and to me.

Oh well, unless someone PMs us, I guess we weren't meant to know.

[Hong Kong Cavalier]

27. Check your PM

nt

[myrna minx]

9. Hello Mr. Rove.

:hi: You are an extremely popular guy around here. :hi:

[Name removed]

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[longship]

18. I answered honestly.

I said negative to every question about the country or CuckooBananas.

What I was saying is that I can see others making the other choice because the question was nuanced, but the responses were not.

Hang up on Gallup??? I don't think so. I think I'll use the opportunity to tell the truth about the neocons--and portray them as bad as I can. That's what I did.

[GreenPartyVoter]

2. Push poll?

[SCDem]

3. And how it will be spun

Just like the economy.... heard on NPR them talk about a economy survey... people felt the economy was horrible and then asked about their own finances felt that they were fine.... so it was spun as if the conomy is really actually good and the damn liberal media are just scaring people into thinking that the economy is bad.

[imenja]

4. How fun!

I've always wanted to be contacted for a poll. I once was contacted about a local sheriff's race, but the automatic machine malfunctioned when I tried to answer.

Did they ask about Rove? ABC News did a Rove poll that is very negative for Bush. It's available on pollingreports.com

[jobycom]

15. That's on purpose, and it's not really nefarious

They understand that there are nuances, but the particular poll they are doing seems to have to do with happiness. For their purpose, you either are or aren't. With a large enough sample, the nuances won't matter as much. Some of those on the boundary will lean one way, some the other, so overall, they'll get a decent picture.

Keep in mind, too, that they know some people will answer based on their political beliefs, and not their real situation. They don't want to know how you feel about the economy or tax cuts, for instance, they want to know how you yourself are actually doing. So they try to word the questions, and even to string together several questions, that will lead you to answer how you are doing, how you actually feel, instead of just what you want the situation to be. Keep in mind, Repubs are in the same dillemma as you. They may want to approve of everything, but be trapped by the questions into revealing how they are actually doing.

They have panels of specialists write these questions and put them in the order they will be asked, just for the purpose of convincing you to answer the questions they want you to answer, instead of the one you might want to answer. If that makes any sense.

I'm not saying the polls aren't biased. Many are. Just that there is a method to the way they ask the questions, and it often has more to do with what they are trying to find out than with their bias. With Gallup, it comes more often in their sampling, from what I've seen.

[Gloria]

21. Let me tell you about the time I was instructed to rig responses

to a questionnaire. This was the job I had as a coding supervisor before I went to work for Gallup (the real Gallup, not the corporate entity that gobbled it up after I left).

The client was a FAMOUS financial institution. We had 4 columns of questions about their image, service, etc. (that means about 40 questions). The client decided they didn't want to spend the money, so I was told to collapse the 4 columns of codes into 2!! Which means, I had to somehow lump answer all together to squeeze 40 questions into 20!!

So, how accurate was THAT survey??????

Not only does the manipulation go on in the actual construction of the questions, but also in the coding process. You don't know how these answers are being combined or broken down....

Enjoy!

[patcox2]

24. So at gallup have you ever been told to manipulate the responses?

I assume you were doing research in house in your story? I do fail to see how producing a crappy and unscientific survey for cost-driven reasons amounts to manipulation. To me, manipulation involves purposely skewing the responses to get a desired result, through using known bias-inducing factors. Your story just indicates that for reasons of cost, they produced an innacurate survey. But you were not asked, for example, to draft the questions and present the response ranges in such an order as to induce a bias towards positive repsonses. That would be manipulation.

Have you ever been asked to produce a particular result?

[Gloria]

26. "Manipulation" in terms of messing up the intent of the survey

through cost cutting, not as a "plot." It was just an illustration how changes in handling data can affect results, in this case, making it very hard to get something coherent. It was for a company, not the public, so they were, in effect, willing to fool themselves in terms of the accuracy of the results.

When I worked at Gallup, the old Gallup, with the "old man" still walking the halls, I never personally did a survey that manipulated questions. At another company, however, I was asked by an ad agency person if I could change data from a taste test we did for their client.

[patcox2]

23. Giving a range instead of "yes-no" can induce its own kind of bias.

Beleive me, there is a science to the wording of questions and to the effect of different forms of question. There are plenty of studies on the impact of various question forms, and the professional pollsters I studied under were very very aware of these things. Asking for a range can be counterproductive, depending on the purpose of the poll. Sometimes you need to force people to choose, people have a tendency not to like to choose and will take the middle ground if its given as a choice. In some polls, there is another response which you are not told about, for example, and it is noted if you mention that response.

Its a valid science, its not all bullshit, and only people who are completely ignorant of the theoretical and practical rules would say that. The polls are the messengers of public opinion and of course people love to shoot the messenger.

[longship]

25. Poll was *very* general.

No specifics. Just asked about "the economy", the "country's direction", stuff like that.

I was a bit shocked that there were no questions on specific issues, like Iraq, Rove, DSM. There were a couple of questions about the news media. I answered all of them appropriately.