Pollsters and Public Opinion

Publishing in the Vancouver based newspaper (online edition) The Province, author Tom Harris actually misses the point himself.

Poll missed the mark

In his brief critique (see above link) of the Insightrix poll about Canadian beliefs about climate change. He says :

"Insightrix needs to rerun the poll, this time asking Canadians about what actually matters."

Dear Tom: Polling companies rarely undertake a poll on their own dime, except maybe during election campaigns during which many parties, both media and political, will be interested in paying to see the results thereof.  After all, pollsters do need to earn money for the effort and service they provide.

Most of the bread pollsters earn comes from contracts that interested parties arrange with them, and those interested parties will expect to have a hand in formulating, or at least, approving the questions that will be asked. In this case, the party which engaged Insightrix's services was an outfit with interests in "carbon capture" technology, hardly a disinterested organization.

A far better course of action would be to require all pollsters to make public the questions they have posed, and perhaps a bit about the organization that is paying for the poll, so we can assess for ourselves whether a certain bias has been predetermined by the way the questions have been phrased.

PS: About a week ago, I received an Insightrix poll via email. I diligently worked my way through the first part of it but eventually abandoned it because the questions were so leading, one could easily tell they were fishing for predetermined results.