Angus Reid talks to Canadian Business about federal politics, refusal rates and web-enabled interview panels. Oh, and how traditional market research organizations, so dependent upon phone interviews, are dinosaurs. One quote from the reporter:

“In the Canadian polling business, what insiders call the “fuck-off rate” is climbing so high that public opinion surveys are losing credibility. After all, if someone is willing to spend 20 minutes talking to a phone surveyor, do we really want to know their opinion?”

Reid spends some time pumping up the technology developed by his son, which now supports market research by automating the creation of online panels of demographically correct and anonymous respondents for online panels. Conveniently, Public Opinion Quarterly has just run “Toward an Open-Source Methodology: What We Can Learn from the Blogosphere“, penned by Mark Blumenthal. He makes a strong point about internet polls (whether opt-in or recruited, in my opinion):

“Opt-in Internet Polls—Experiment and Validate but with Caution: At what point do the compromises to probability sampling become too great? At what point, if ever, might we place greater trust in surveys drawn from opt-in panels? The only way we will know is by continued experimentation, disclosure, and attempts to evaluate the results through the Total Survey Error framework.

Opt-in panels are gaining popularity, whether we approve or not. We should encourage those who procure and consume such research to do so with great caution and to demand full disclosure of methods and results. If nonprobability sampling can ever routinely deliver results empirically proven more valid or reliable, we will need to understand what produces such a result.”

Finally, Blumenthal makes an observation about …

“…. the blogosphere’s commentary on polling methodology [in 2004]: Some is good; some, bad; some, ugly. It embodies many of the themes common to all of the passages cited above: a fascination and openness to new technologies, an instinct to test the quality of polling by validation against election results, and the enduring paradox of consumers who view polling as badly flawed and untrustworthy and yet remain obsessed with every twitch of the numbers.”

I think the word consumers is too wide-ranging: any debate about politics and polling, while vigorous, is still only occupying the attention of a small subset of the American (in 2004) and Canadian (in December 2005) population.

That said, make sure to get your SES daily tracking poll. Be the first on the block to question the reliability of your newspaper’s polling company!

Technorati: public opinion research polling survey