Polls and Poll-Emics
Regardless of one's opinion on the Brooklyn museum (whatever), this sort of thing is almost enough to make us call for a national center to monitor polling excesses. Pollsters, however, do monitor one another now and then. After a "whatever" question in a National Law Journal poll produced 75 percent support for jury nullification, pollsters at Frederick Schneiders Research in Washington, D.C., showed that when you reverse the "whatever" sentence structure, you also reverse the poll result: 74 percent opposed nullification.
Tortured. In a 1993 poll by Roper Starch Worldwide, 22 percent of Americans said the Holocaust might not have happened. But the question was framed in tortured language ("Does it seem possible or does it seem impossible to you that the Nazi extermination of the Jews never happened?"). Gallup got a similar result using the Roper language. But when Gallup asked the question plainly, less than half a percent said the Holocaust never happened, and only 2 percent had real doubts.
Yankelovich Partners did a good job of deflating Ross Perot's 1993 poll showing strong support for Perot positions on issues such as debt reduction and trade agreements. Perot got 67 percent to support a debt reduction plan calling for $2 in spending cuts for each dollar of tax increase. But the poll gave no clue as to where the cuts would come from or what the social costs might be. Yankelovich's poll showed that half of public approval disappeared when the question added the words "even if that meant cuts in domestic programs like Medicare and education?"
One problem with polls is that all questions and answers are usually distilled down to what the pollster says they all mean. This is distilled down even further to a press release that will pretty much determine how reporters treat the story. Another common ploy is withholding raw data from the media, thus forcing reporters to work with some sketchy material and an overstated press release. "There are all sorts of dirty little secrets in polling," says Robert Lichter of the Statistical Assessment Service. "Readers have to be their own editors. Don't look at the interpretation. Look at what people actually said."
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