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"Polls Face Growing Resistance, But Still Representative"
"WASHINGTON -- Faced with a growing number of unsolicited telephone calls and armed with increasingly sophisticated technology for screening their calls, more Americans are refusing to participate in telephone polls than was the case just six years ago. Yet a survey research experiment to gauge the effects of respondent cooperation on survey quality indicates that carefully conducted polls continue to obtain representative samples of the public and provide accurate data about the views and experiences of Americans. A typical five-day survey conducted by the Pew Research Center, employing standard techniques used by most opinion polling organizations, now obtains interviews with people in fewer than three-in ten sampled households (27%). That represents a decrease of about nine percentage points (on average) from the late 1990s. The decline results from increased reluctance to participate in surveys and not from an inability by survey organizations to contact someone in a household, according to the Pew Research Center.The growing use of answering machines, voice mail, caller ID, and call blocking is not preventing survey organizations from reaching an adult in most of the households sampled, the center finds. Across five days of interviewing, surveys today are able to make some kind of contact with the vast majority of households (76%), and there is no decline in this contact rate over the past seven years. But because of busy schedules, skepticism and outright refusals, interviews were completed in just 38% of households that were reached using standard polling procedures. In 1997, a majority of those who were reached (58%) cooperated with the survey. The decline in cooperation also was seen in a separate survey, which had a much longer field period and used more rigorous survey techniques. In this poll, which was in the field for five months, 59% of contacted respondents cooperated, compared with 74% in 1997. But the decline in participation has not undermined the validity of most surveys conducted by reputable polling organizations, according to the Pew Research Center. When compared with benchmarks obtained from the U.S. Census and other government surveys with response rates that exceed 90%, the demographic and social composition of the samples in the average poll today is remarkably accurate. Judged by their accuracy in forecasting voter behavior on Election Day, properly designed election surveys conducted just before voting continue to be highly valid.And even though a typical survey interviews only around one-in-four or one-in-three people it attempts to reach, there is little to suggest that those who do not participate hold substantially different views on policy and political issues. As in its 1997 survey research study, the Pew Research Center experiment found little difference between a standard survey - conducted with commonly utilized polling techniques over a five-day period - and a survey conducted over a much longer period that employed more rigorous techniques aimed at obtaining a high rate of response. The rigorous survey obtained a response rate of 51%, compared with 27% for the standard survey. However, a comparison of more than 90 separate measures covering a wide range of attitudes and behaviors found relatively small differences between the two surveys. The median difference was less than two percentage points, well within the margin of sampling error. In addition, there was no clear pattern to the differences. Nonetheless, there are notable differences between typical survey respondents and people who are hardest to reach in such surveys - those who were successfully interviewed only after multiple attempts or who declined to participate on at least two occasions before complying. Some of these differences reflect the practical difficulties of polling. For example, the hardest to reach are less likely to be at home in the evening, when survey organizations conduct most of their telephone surveys. People who are reluctant to participate also are less engaged by politics and say they vote in lower numbers. Yet here again, there were no consistent attitudinal differences between typical survey respondents and those who are more difficult to interview. One consistent pattern that the survey experiment revealed is that people who are reluctant to be interviewed are somewhat less interested and engaged in politics than those who readily consent to an interview. Fewer people in the rigorous survey - particularly among the hardest to reach - said they were registered to vote or reported voting in the 2002 congressional election. A majority in the standard sample (56%) say they voted in 2002, compared with 48% in the rigorous sample and 46% among the hardest to-interview.5 Those most difficult to interview were also less likely than those in the standard sample to know that the Republican party has a majority in the U.S. Senate (57% vs. 63%). Respondents in the rigorous survey, as well as those who were most difficult to reach, also were more apt to have no opinion about issues asked about in the survey. But the hardest-to-reach were similar to other respondents in their news consumption habits. There were no differences in the percentages saying they had read a newspaper, watched TV news, or heard the news on radio yesterday. "