Quote:
Originally Posted by Elli
This is why polls are anonymous. They are used to collect statistics, not information on individuals. There are also margins of error taken into account that allow for lying/misunderstanding questions/mistake answers/errors in reporting. That's one of the first things we learned in stats class, actually.
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"The Cooperative Congressional Election Study
was conducted online by YouGov from October 4th to November 6th"
CCES Pre-Election Survey, 2016 | CCES
- so even if the poll was designed to be "anonymous", the poll taker has no guarantee that the poll is indeed "anonymous"... (it's relatively easy to track someone down based on ip address)
- then there are numerous "sampling biases" with the fact that the poll was "online"...
.... it's certainly not accurate statistic of the population - includes only internet users
.... it includes only those willing to participate
.... etc
let me ask you a hypothetical question...
imagine you under-reported your taxes by $100k last year by using some shady tactics that would land you in jail for 5 years if caught
a. would you go to some online "anonymous" poll to answer questions about "tax evasion"?
b. if you did, on a scale from 1 to 10, how likely do you think you would be to answer truthfully about your recent criminal activity?