Opinion Polls,anyone Been Asked?

[EDDIE51]

Just wondered if any on AB have actually been asked to participte in an opinion poll about an election?
Also how do they choose the people to ask? I am not sure the selection of participants is random, for example if it is a phone poll , those like me who only have a mobile will never be asked.
What steps are taken to ensure that all sections of society are equally represented?

[Slapshot]

Gallup street poll for the Independence nonsense last year, just a yes or a no was all they asked but I believe they use phones and all sorts of other media

[Hopkirk]

No, never been asked.

[fiction-factory]

I think they are stratified samples and they go to great lengths to get a representative mix of social groups. Polls often cover only around 2000 people I recall- the accuracy doesn't change much by taking samples of 10000; so I think the chances of a person being asked at any given election are pretty small given that there are, I would guess, around 30-40 million voters

[jim360]

I got polled prior to the 2014 Referendum. Asked a whole bunch of questions about Scottish Politics, etc. Can't remember who did the polling, but it was by telephone.

[Hopkirk]

If I was asked I would give a wrong answer just to mess up their system.

I used to love the days when polls were inaccurate and you didn't know the result until it was announced.

I think John Major's win was the last time an exit poll was wrong.

[EDDIE51]

I was thinking it was mainly by phone and those with no landline are going to be underepresented. I was also thinking that such people are more likedly to be 'working class' and potential Labour voters. Is it posible there is an inbuilt bias against Labour for those reasons?

[Peter Pedant]

telephonic polls never really recovered from wrongly predicting the Presidential election in ? 1945
Chicago Trib carried the headline "Dewey by a landslide"
and everyone knows Dewey was never president

oops

I knew that pollsters skipped various people - you dont want 70% unemployed in your poll or no OAPs because OAPs are renowned for getting out of bed and voting on polling day...

but google
opinion polls quota filling

debate I had not realised has been raging for fifty years on that one
( enough links to make your eyes glaze over )

[Peter Pedant]

// If I was asked I would give a wrong answer just to mess up their system. //

a poll of one is gonna be pretty unrepresentative - a poll of 100 is better and a poll of 1,000 even better

so the larger the poll the less the wobble ( plus or minus 3% seems common ) Jim'll fill in the technical bit - standard error of the mean I think.

Thatcher's election was wrongly predicted - by 2%
and that has happened to Netanyahu recently - too close to call and then he won a clear majority....

IN those two, the pollsters agonised ( coz they lose money if they call it wrong see ?) and put in a wobble for small poll numbers and then a wobble for quota filling and then a wobble for dont-knows not following the distribution of the do-knows
and they still didnt get the right answer on the day and concluded....

people had been intentionally misleading the pollsters

[EDDIE51]

PP telephone polls in 1945? I am not surprised they got it wrong, I would not think even 5% of 'ordinary' people had a phone then, they would have been for the rich and famous only.

[Mamyalynne]

I do 'YouGov' polls online - over the year they touch on various topics and yes at the moment the emphasis is on Political matters.