Wednesday, October 13, 2010

Taking Polls with a Grain (or More) of Salt

Link to October 13 Pew Research Center report, "Cell phones and election polls: an update".

ExcerptThe latest estimates of telephone coverage by the National Center for Health Statistics found that a quarter of U.S. households have only a cell phone and cannot be reached by a landline telephone. Cell-only adults are demographically and politically different from those who live in landline households; as a result, election polls that rely only on landline samples may be biased. Although some survey organizations now include cell phones in their samples, many -- including virtually all of the automated polls -- do not include interviews with people on their cell phones.

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