No grey areas
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- April
- 23
Last night my home telephone number was randomly selected to be part of a Quinnipiac University poll on national politics, or so the fellow who called told me. It was the first time I’ve gotten to contribute MY thoughts to one of the big national polls we often report on, so I said I’d be happy to participate. Â
Little did I know how hard it would be to simply answer the questions. The pollster asked about issues regarding Pres. Obama, the Republicans in Congress, the Democrats, the state of economy, the question of gay marriage, gays in the military, abortion, and the United States’ relationship with various countries (on a scale of 1 to 100).
Naturally, given my job title, I have no shortage of opinions on any of those subjects. The hard part was shoe-horning my opinion into a simple “favorable/unfavorable” or “agree/disagree.” Â I wanted to add a “But” to every answer I gave. Who knew it would be so hard to issue opinion that’s just yes or no, without adding a nuance or a lengthier explanation? I know that pollsters dwell in the realm of statistics and that they can’t quantify the “buts” or the clarifications, but it seemed to me that the answers I gave were only half-truths because of the missing explanations.
It did make me realize that framing the question of a poll can definitely skew the results. It also made me grateful for my job, where I can express an opinion at length.
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on Thursday, April 23rd, 2009 at 10:01 am by Debra West.
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