Archive for anthony wells
Ssssh! Don't mention this opinion poll finding
Here’s one opinion poll finding that has had almost no coverage and I suspect will continue to do so because its finding is so at odds with what nearly everyone is saying. It’s from Anthony Wells’s excellent polling blog: YouGov re-asked a question from back in 2009 about whether people though Britain was a broken [...]
Posts of the week: LibDem challenges and prospects
Welcome to my weekly round-up of two blogging highlights from the past week: the post that I found most interesting or enjoyable to write and the post from someone else that I found most interesting or entertaining. A post from me… The Liberal Democrat challenges for 2011: defining and explaining economic fairness For Nick Clegg, [...]
Opinion poll reporting: who did it best this year?
Since the start of the year, The Voice has been tracking how newspapers do at reporting the political opinion polls they commission. Each time a newspaper reports on such an opinion poll, the report gets scored out of 30 against a set of basic criteria. The scoring system has generally worked well, though it doesn’t catch [...]
Are ITV the unluckiest commissioner of opinion polls?
In the run-up to the 2005 general election, there was some excitement as a rolling poll commissioned by ITV from Populus showed the Conservatives slipping to a result even worse than 1997. However, there was a sharp (5 point) recovery in the final pre-election day poll from Populus, which was a normal non-rolling poll.
Picking over [...]
How did the media do at reporting opinion polls in January?
As I blogged last month, The Voice is going to start rating the quality of the media’s coverage of opinion polls, which is often far from perfect:
There is progress, helped no doubt by the criticism from Anthony Wells and Mike Smithson, both of whom are respected by many of the relevant journalists.
However, there is still [...]
Media to start getting marked for quality of opinion poll reporting
The quality of traditional media coverage of political opinion polling has been a common cause of complaints amongst political bloggers. The most obvious problem is when an opinion poll from one polling company is compared not with the previous poll from that company but against an older one because the intervening one happened to have [...]
Modern attitudes to research: a different perspective
Over on his blog, Joe Nutt has deprecated some modern approaches to research: Something which completely bemused me when I first left the world of academic English teaching and the scholarship that goes with it, for the world of educational technology, was what that ICT world seemed happy to call “research.” Over the years I’ve [...]
YouGov marginals polls: a smattering of details
YouGov’s now annual mammoth marginals poll is out. It’s heavily talked about elsewhere, so here are a few extracts that are likely to be of particular interest to The Voice’s readers:
As was the case last year, there is still no sign of Liberal Democrat supporters tactically voting Conservative to oust Labour though neither is there [...]
Tax on £1m houses: 69% in favour
We don’t usually do individual polls on The Voice, relying instead on Stephen’s monthly round-ups. But we do make exceptions when there’s something particularly striking or interesting about them and one of the recent YouGov questions falls into this category.
With the usual caveats about it a poll that is carried out in the middle of [...]
