Public Opinion Reporting in the Vidette

As Thomas mentioned as we were gearing up to start class earlier, today's issue of the Daily Vidette reports on a Pew survey about public support for abortion. You can read CNN's coverage of the survey here and the full report from Pew here (pdf).

Ambiguous Question Wording and Irresponsible Reporting

Here's a recent post from the Monkey Cage blog that brings together two polling problems we've discussed in class recently in its criticism of a recent Gallup poll report: wording poll questions ambiguously (in this case, by asking respondents about government promotion of "traditional values"), so that too much is left up to the interpretation of individual respondents, and reporting on poll results in a way that overstates their findings. In related news, this post on the Washington Post's "Behind the Numbers" blog highlights the importance of comparing different polls on the same topic (in this case, abortion) before drawing hasty conclusions about critical shifts in public opinion.

Media and Polling Resources

Here's the video interview we watched in class today:



AAPOR's disclosure standards are available here. You might also want to check out the related FAQs page and new checklist and sample disclosure form. The complete article with the NCPP's 20 questions for journalists writing about polls is here.

Finally, feel free to register for the News University online course on "Understanding and Interpreting Polls," which, as we saw in class, provides some guidelines for reporting on public opinion polls as well as a useful review of a lot of the "nuts and bolts of polling" topics we've been discussing the last few weeks.