More Bad Press

The June 16 issue of BusinessWeek
does some piling on with an article titled, “Online Polls: How Good Are
They?”     It’s the sort of superficial
piece you’d expect, but we should not be surprised if a client or two doesn’t
bring it to our attention.    To the
author’s credit, he interviewed Jon Krosnick who has spent a lot of time
looking at online and online panel performance over the last several
years. 

The article hits two key points: (1) the flaws of
non-probability sampling and (2) the dangers of relying on professional
respondents who take surveys to get paid. 
The callout summarizes the key issue as well as the author’s naiveté: "Because researchers often offer prizes to volunteer
participants, a critic worries Web surveys are just poll-taking clubs."

The author predictably finds his way to Knowledge Networks
and parrots back their standard marketing spiel. 

This is one of my favorite mainstream publications, and this article
makes me wonder whether the pieces they do on topics I don’t know well are as
bad as this one on a topic I understand.