Short Critical Essays

Short Critical Essays

Article 1

This year's election opinion polls have come under scrutiny on BBC Radio 4's Today programme. Ben Page, chief executive of Ipsos-MORI, told interviewer John Humphrys that the UK polling industry has a "pretty good record".FT columnist and More or Less presenter Tim Harford put the view that "in a year where everything seems to be up in the air I would have thought it more likely that the opinion polls will be misleading this kind of election."Harford was responding to a question from Humphrys as to whether he trusted the opinion polls in this year's election. He said "the polling companies are doing their best". From his viewpoint, Page told Humphrys that "six out of ten voters say they don't pay much attention to them [polls] and they're not interested in them". He added that: "polling companies are just trying to report public opinion as it is now."Asked by Humphrys if polls were to be trusted, Harford explained that all opinion polls come with a margin of error.

"It's useful to understand what kind of errors are encompassed in the margin and all the other possible sources of error," he said, going on to explain what margin of error in sampling is, and other sources of poll error. In this latter category he mentioned that opinions are gathered online, face to face and on the phone and explained how bias could occur. Page acknowledged such problems, saying that his "entire profession is about trying to avoid them" and outlining some of the ways Ipsos-MORI and other pollsters try to make sure polls are representative.Page said the variations between polls were often "due to timing, but also because of margin of error, the polls are accurate to plus or minus 3 or 4 per cent". Asked about 'rogue polls', he said "one poll in 20 - because of the law of statistics - will have a margin of error that is greater than 3 or 4 per cent". Page defended the UK polling industry's record, saying that at the last general election the average error "was less than one per cent - and if you look at all the polls since 1950 the average error has only been 1.5 per cent, so the polls have actually a pretty good record except in one or two years." But he asked rhetorically: "is this one of those years?"

In an earlier BBC News broadcast, BBC political research editor David Cowling described how after decades interpreting polls in a political duopoly, the rise in support for the Liberal Democrats presented poll watchers with new challenges.Have a view on the opinion polls? If you're a registered user of this site you can comment on this story by logging in. Nowadays the overlay network has greatly improved the performance of the Internet. The overlay network flexibly selects its communication paths and targets and thus can benefit from estimation of end-to-end network performances. For an overlay network with n end hosts, most of the ...