This is from the 2008 General Social Survey - Selected Tables on Social Engagement. I am highlighting this one table to show how fundamentally wrong the research is. This is a table of the voter turn out in BC based on what people answering the survey answered they did in the last election. The numbers are wildly far off of reality.
The provincial election this surveyed asked about was the 2005 one, problem is that only 1,762,450 voted in that election and not 2,420,000 as the survey suggests.
The last federal election would be the 2006 one and the turnout in BC was 1,827,183 and not 2,459,000 as the survey suggests.
Since we know this survey is so dramatically off on this one data point we have hard data on, we can not rely on any of the rest of data as reflecting what the public thinks. The spending on this exercise by Statistics Canada was a complete waste of money. They should explain why they are so wrong and if they can not explain it they need to stop doing any work like this.
While it is a waste of resources to have done this survey at all, the bigger problem is that people rely on the data in the survey as having some connection to reality. The whole dataset needs to be removed from the internet and replaced with a statement from Statistics Canada along the lines of the work was fundamentally flawed and gives no quantitative information of relevance.
So why would the voter turnout numbers be so much higher in the survey than in reality? I suspect that it is because many people who did not vote planned on voting and do not want to admit they did not vote. They lied on the survey, a much more common occurrence than most people are willing to admit happens in polling.
Pollsters need to figure out how to account for people that lie in polls. While I do not have the rigorous data to show the details of a bias, the best I can get to is that public in many polls is biased against the government and for the main opposition.
2 comments:
On the contrary, it shouldn't be pulled, you've just made an extremely valuable quantitative observation on the basis of this survey, since you have the (rare) opportunity in this case to compare survey results with an population measure. And you've made a useful discovery with your observation! Perhaps it should be annotated to make it 100% clear that what people say they did is not necessarily what they did, but otherwise, it's a very interesting data point.
Except in BC in 2009 where almost all the polls projected a BC Liberal landslide and where the results ended up actually being very close. The Angus Reid online poll was the only one that didn't significantly underestimate BC NDP support in that election.
PS: I don't think people "lie" about not having voted. i think that many people who don't vote in election also refuse to take part in surveys of any kind.
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