The Survey Geek

Tag: Political Polling

  • Polling Again!

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    RegBaker
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    Once again the second biggest story coming out of a US presidential election is what one commentator described as "the absolutely massive failure of political polling." Really?  Consider this. Nate Silver, relying mostly on surveys, predicted that Joe Biden would win 30 states and that the tipping point state would be Pennsylvania. He forecasted the…

  • Finding the soul of research

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    RegBaker
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    I stole the title of this post from Simon Chadwick's editorial in the November/December issue of Research World. It reminded me that I, like many young people, began my career as something of an idealist. My first two jobs were with nonprofits and then in 1984 I joined NORC at the University of Chicago, whose tagline was…

  • ESOMAR Congress 2015: All behavior all the time

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    RegBaker
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    OK, so that’s a bit of an exaggeration and at a conference with as many concurrent sessions as we have here in Dublin there is a strong element of self-selection. Nonetheless, I’m coming away from these three days with an even stronger sense than I had coming in that the future of research is about…

  • Mixed mode, but with a twist

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    RegBaker
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    I was in London last week at the MRS Annual Conference where there were a number of interesting sessions, including an excellent workshop on social media measurement by Ray Poynter from NewMR that I believe Ray is turning into a webinar. One of my favorites among the other presentations was one by Neil Griffiths from…

  • CASRO Online – Part 3

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    RegBaker
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    The afternoon session has launched and we are going to be hearing about the data privacy issues inherent in data integration. Presenters are from J.D. Power and SSI. They did a multi-mode study (online panel, web intercept, and RDD) in three counties – US, China, and India. They have done a nice little review of…

  • Big data — not so scary

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    RegBaker
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    I’ve been reading Nate Silver’s The Signal and the Noise.  It’s not the sort of book I normally would read, but since Nate kept me from a jumping off a tall building during the last election I felt I owed him the $27.95.  Given Nate’s record predicting election outcomes you might think this is a…

  • Let’s do better with mobile design

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    RegBaker
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    One of the ironies of mobile MR is that after almost a decade of increasing the clutter on online questionnaire screens with gadgets and images in the name of increasing engagement we now are faced with a platform were less really is more.  This point is driven home by Mobile Usability, a new book by…

  • About those 2013 predictions

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    RegBaker
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    Like it or not, the MR prediction season is upon us. For the most they will look eerily like last year and, in many cases, the year before that. A couple of weeks back on the heels of the Mayan bust I read a piece (unfortunately, I can’t remember where) describing how people respond when…

  • Lie down with dogs, get up with fleas

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    RegBaker
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    Brian Singh has a post over on GreenBook that gives us his take on a recent conference where a group of venture capitalists shared their views on the investment opportunities in MR as it grapples with its future.  I didn’t find most of what Brian reported to be surprising; it’s pretty much the standard stuff…

  • The real lessons from US electoral polling

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    RegBaker
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    There has been a lot of buzz in MR circles about US electoral polling and especially the summary of accuracy of the polls produced by Nate Silver. As I wrote in this blog at the time Nate's piece appeared it's only natural for researchers to zero in on data collection methodology and that's pretty much…