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Politics : GOPwinger Lies/Distortions/Omissions/Perversions of Truth -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: HPilot who wrote (164907)	3/22/2010 5:04:34 PM
From: Kevin Rose	1 Recommendation Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 173976

The problem is when the 'randomness' doesn't reflect the true distribution of the population. If there is no verifiable means of ensuring that the so-called 'random' selection reflects the overall population, the results are skewed. For example, online poll responses are notoriously prone to error. An online poll on, say, MSNBC will get markedly different results than on, say, FOX, because their target audience - while a subset of the population - is not a representative subset. Self-selected responses also suffer from the issue of motivation, which is compounded by the amount of effort needed to respond. People are more likely to go through the effort of responding if they feel negatively - hence, the higher ratio of customer product complaints versus customer acclaims than to actual product defects. So, the problem is two-fold: achieving a random sampling; and weighting the results back to actual demographics. This poll appeared to do neither, as shown by a lack of stated methodology and the fact that they included all responses in the results.