Gallup Poll Worksheet Answers

Gallup Poll Worksheet Answers

Name

Key

1. List three reasons Americans contact the Gallup Organization. a. to ask why Gallup differs from their personal impressions

b. to learn how Gallup selects people for polls

c. to find out why they have never been interviewed

2. What did a recent "poll on polls" reveal about how believable people think polls are? People think that polls generally do a good job of forecasting elections and are accurate when measuring public opinion. They are skeptical on the sampling technique.

3. What is the fundamental goal of a survey? To come up with the same results that would have been obtained if every single member of a population had been interviewed.

4. What is equal probability of selection? If every member of a population has an equal probability of being selected in a sample, then that sample will be representative of the population.

5. Why does Gallup try to reach people at home? It is a place where all or most Americans are equally likely to be found.

6. How were the earliest polls conducted? When did this take place? They were conducted in person with Gallup interviewers going door to door. This lasted 50 years ? from 1935 until the mid 1980's.

7. How accurate were the presidential elections between 1936 and 1984? Highly accurate ? the average error was less than 3 percentage points.

8. How did the Gallup polls change in 1986? Why? The polls were conducted by telephone ? by then most people had a phone.

9. What is the first step in the Gallup process? Explain in detail. Clearly identify and describe the population that a given poll is attempting to represent. Be sure that the population is representative of what the poll is about.

10. What is Gallup's target audience? Who is NOT included? The target audience is all adults, aged 18 and over, living in telephone households within the continental U.S. It is the civilian, non-institutionalized population. It does not include college students living on campus, armed forces personnel living on military bases, prisoners, hospital patients, and other groups of people living in institutions.

11. What is the next step in the Gallup process? Explain in detail. Choose or design a method which will enable Gallup to sample the target population randomly. It begins with a computerized list of all telephone numbers in the U.S. along with estimates of the number of residential homes that have exchanges attached to them. The computer creates phone number (randomly) from these and generates telephone samples from those.

12. Why is it important to go through this "complicated" procedure? 30% of American residential phones are unlisted. We must include these to have an accurate poll.

13. How many interviews does it take to provide an adequate cross-section of Americans? 1000 national adults

Lee Kucera

Page 1

10/11/2012

14. What is more important than the actual number of people which need to be interviewed for a given sample? The soundness of the fundamental equal probability of selection principle. (Everyone is selected at random)

15. How big does a survey sample have to be before there are fewer and fewer accuracy gains coming from increasing the sample size? How big is the Gallup sample size? 500 ? 700. Gallup's sample size is 1000 ? 1500.

16. What is the "margin of error"? The amount by which the poll could be off. This should be quite low.

17. What does Gallup do if there is no answer or the phone is busy? Why? Gallup stores the number and it is recalled later.

18. What does Gallup do once the household has been reached by phone? Why? They want to assure that an individual from that house is selected randomly (if there is more

than one adult in the household) They usually ask for the adult with the latest birthday. Or they ask the person who answers the phone for a list of all adults, and then has the computer select an individual randomly.

19. How does Gallup ask people who they are going to vote for in an election? They read the names of the candidates and mention the name of the party line on which they are running ? information a person would see on the ballot.

20. What advantage does Gallup have in asking questions about key issues? They have a historical track record ? they have been conducting polls for many years.

21. How does Gallup ask people about presidential job approval? "Do you approve or disapprove the job ________ is doing as president?"

22. What is a split sample technique? A randomly selected half of a given survey is administered one wording of a question, while the other half is administered the other wording.

23. How are results tabulated? Continuously and automatically by the computer.

24. What are primary standard caveats observed when interpreting poll results? Question wording, question order, the sample population, sample size, random selection technique that was used, execution of the sample, method of interviewing.

25. What is the key concept a person should bear in mind when analyzing poll data? Public opinion on a given topic cannot be understood by using only a single poll question asked a single time. It is necessary to measure opinion along several different dimensions, to review attitudes based on a variety of different wordings, to verify findings on the basis of multiple askings, and to pay attention to changes in opinion over time.

Lee Kucera

Page 2

10/11/2012

 ................
................

In order to avoid copyright disputes, this page is only a partial summary.

Google Online Preview   Download