Polls.

Remove all ads!

On my way to work, I read the newspapers what usually takes me about 25 – 30 minutes, enough to read almost every ‘important’ news; lately (about 2 months) I found a new survey every day and there are for everyone: about age, woman, men, tourism, food, and believe me, almost every unthinkable thing in the world.
For example: the other day I found out that Brad Pitt and J. Lo are the most beautiful people in the world, but, that decision came after some English magazine asked to: 100 teenagers!
Today I found out that old people (from 65 to 80) like to party, the survey took place at 3 major cities: Paris, London and Chicago and were asked …500 people!
A local Spanish newspaper conducted another poll asking who would you take with you to go out for some drinks (like to go to a bar with a partner or a friend, you know) and there where 2 choices: politicians and people from TV and of course you had to say the name of that person; so, according to the poll Spanish people would like to go out with a politician, and who was voted the most is Zapatero, the president; so, because 75 people said so, every Spaniard thinks so too.
There are those which ask about the future: yesterday we found out that ‘we will be more optimists in… 2025! – 79% of Spanish people will own their houses… in 2047! – We will have more ecologist mind by…2012!
I mean, how they get that? “When you think you will have ecologic mind?” “When you believe you will be more optimist?”
So, I will do my own poll; this topic comprises 3 basic questions for your debate and opinion:
1)Do you have this kind of polls in your country? If yes, give us some examples, please.
2)Do you think they are accurate? I mean, do you think 100 people can decide how 5000000 people think?
3)Are these polls worth for something?

I think they worth nothing and can't be taken serioulsly (most of them).

But that's my opinion. Yours?

 

Sure we have polls, does not everyone have polls? I'm not quite sure what kind of polls you are looking for now but the first that springs to my mind are the polls which measure the popularity of the political parties, and they are unbelievably accurate. 100 out of 50000000 is of course way too little, when you pick 500 000 from various parts of the country from different social situation you start to get somewhere.

Polls have their uses since they can tell what people in the country are thinking about various issues. Of course they are also easily manipulated and in many cases completely unreliable as the case almost allways tends to be with statistics.

 

It depends on the nature of the poll, for example a few years back a certain US magazine had 'sexiest man ever' vote, but its a different person every year! Why would someone be considered 'sexy' one year, but not the year before or after?

Statistics on how people view different countries etc are things that I find very useful.

 

Bah! "There are lies, damn lies ... and statistics!"

 

Well, in statistics, there has to be a minimum number of respondents and there should be certain controls used, like the way the questions are phrased.

 

They have them here, and I think that they're good for a laugh...

Usually the questions are BS anyway...