At Home with Polling?

by Danielle Meyers

"No, sorry, my mother isn't available for your survey. She took a trip to Africa and will never be coming back!" Sound familiar? Most everyone today seems to be very bothered by calls telemarketers make trying to sell something, or pollsters make, seeking people's responses. These calls, which seem to typically occur around dinner time, tend to be about "issues ranging from a favorite flavor of ice cream to a political issue that will guide a politician in framing his policy.

In a recent interview with G. Donald Ferree, Jr., Senior Research Scientist at the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research at the University of Connecticut, we learned that until the relatively recent explosion of surveys, many people actually felt flattered that they were being polled. Rather than feeling bothered, they were eager to cooperate. Things have certainly changed!

Scientific polling originally started in the early to mid 1930's by men named George Gallup, Elmo Roper, and Archibald Crossley. However, the earliest form of polling was done as a mail-back survey conducted by the Literary Digest's readership. There were problems with this method of polling primarily because the sample of respondents was drawn from lists of telephone customers and owners of cars, representing an upscale population for that time in history.

Polling techniques have changed substantially and become much more sophisticated since the 1930's. Today, polls are used by many organizations and are typically conducted by selecting random phone numbers, technically called random digit dialing, as a means of giving a fair chance to everyone and hopefully getting a good cross section of