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Comment on Sparrow and Curtice and Kellner.

Article Excerpt
This paper looks at the arguments in the previous papers by Kellner and Sparrow and Curtice and comments on the internet polling debate.

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I remember back in the early 1980s, market researchers got very concerned about the adequacy of telephone sampling as a general population research tool. In particular, the performance of the opinion polls was the catalyst for major debate based on the fear that telephone polling ran the risk of bringing the industry into disrepute by producing poor estimates of voting intention. A substantial body of potential Labour supporters could not be reached by phone at the time, though the size of that group was diminishing year by year as telephone penetration rose.

In 1987 the Market Research Development Fund (MRDF) conducted a controlled experiment during the election campaign to establish the facts once and for all (Husbands 1987). I was Chairman of MRDF at the time and played an active part in directing the research. The findings were fascinating. The telephone sample was indeed somewhat biased as expected when analysed unweighted. However, the application of increasing levels of weighting reduced the bias until, at the final step, the use of...

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