The same kinds of social values that determine whether or not one subscribes to landline telephone service - social values our company tracks like Aversion to Complexity, Technology Anxiety, Tried and True - impacts their decisions as voters. Importantly for 2008 (and beyond), pollsters that treat landline and cell phone only voters the same are making less than accurate predictions.

Traditional public opinion polling has evolved over the years, but since the latter part of the 20th Century how those surveys are conducted hasn't changed all that much. To completely oversimplify, the process is pretty straightforward: get a representative sample of respondents on the telephone, design an instrument that asks good questions, weight the sample when appropriate and run the crosstabs.

While all of those steps are important to ensure accuracy, pollsters tightly hold their secret formulas for weighting samples. It's the industry's version of KFC's 13 original spices. Virtually all pollsters, however, when thinking about weighting do so by weighting a combination of demographic information or partisanship.

In the last few years changes in technology have complicated matters a bit for pollsters. The rise of the use of cell phones and caller ID have skewed the kinds of people that answer survey calls and agree to participate in the research. There has been a tremendous amount of debate in the pollster world, for example, about cell phones. For a long time, cell phones were excluded from most polling research. While many (if not most) pollsters now try to incorporate cell phone numbers into their research, the response rate is often different between landline and cell phone respondents.

Continue reading "Cell Phones, Landlines and the 2008 Election" »