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During 23 years with BBC Cymru Wales (BBC CW), and 42 years in journalism (when he was trained to use clear and simple language, avoiding jargon), polling figures have always loomed large for our Editor, Welshman Phil Parry, because they show how popular or otherwise is a controversial policy or person, but it was important to be cautious with them in days gone by, as sometimes people GOT IT WRONG!
I have written extensively about the importance of polling figures – this is true, although to do a partial ‘reverse ferret’ (a journalistic term for taking the opposite view), they should also have been taken with a large pinch of salt in the past, because sometimes apparent popular opinion is just plain wrong.
Two glaring instances come to mind: bringing back hanging (when after presenting any number of miscarriage of justice programmes, I know only too well that an innocent person might be killed), and information about the great supporter of terror during the French revolution – Jean-Paul Marat.
In the first example, the public support for executions of child murders and police officers appears pretty consistent in past surveys.
Nine years ago a petition to the UK Parliament and UK Government declared: “Bring back hanging for child murder and police officers. It is about time the death penalty was brought back and made law again . This would deter such offences happening in the first place. Give the judges of this country the laws to enforce the death penalty“.
In the second, Marat was a blood-thirsty conman (who was famously killed in his bath), but enormously popular with a minority of the public.
During the summer of 1790 in his daily pamphlet ‘L’Ami du peuple’ (‘The Friend of the people’) the public was urged: “…lop off six hundred heads (to save) five or six million citizens”.
Marat engaged in quack medicine calling himself ‘Doctor of the incurable’, and among his treatments was subjecting patients to electrotherapy to the eyes, for far-sightedness, but when his work was turned down by the ‘Academy of Sciences’ he was outraged, and convinced friends to finance (as well as rig) supportive essays to the institute making clear how mistaken they were.
Yet when he was murdered there was a huge funeral procession, his rotting corpse was shouldered by a dozen men, commemorative pottery became all the rage, and towns were named after him.
So as with hanging, if there had been opinion polls in his day (when they would have been even less scientific than today), Marat might have been way up there.
Today, though, any number of steps are taken to ensure that polls are RIGHT!
The companies behind them have refined their methods hugely since the debacle of the 1992 exit poll which showed Neil Kinnock holding power.
Today they are massively technical, with the two main characteristics of surveys being that they have a) respondents chosen by the research company, and b) that sufficient information is collected about these people to ensure that the data in the published results match the profile of the group being surveyed.
For example, if the population being sampled contains 52 per cent who are women and 30 per cent who are over 55, then a typical opinion poll will ensure that its published data contains these proportions of women and older respondents.
The choice of respondents is done using two main methods. The first is ‘random’ sampling, the second ‘quota sampling‘.
With random sampling, a polling company either uses a list of randomly-drawn phone numbers or email addresses (for telephone or some Internet polls); or holds face-to-face visits using randomly-drawn addresses, as well as names pulled from a list such as an electoral register (for some surveys). The polling company then contacts people on those telephone numbers or at those addresses, and asks them to take part in the survey.
‘Quota sampling’ involves setting quotas (such as age or gender), and then seeking out different people in each location who, together, match those characteristics. ‘Quota sampling’ is often used in face-to-face surveys.
In addition, some Internet polls employ quota samples to select representative samples from a database of people who have already provided such information about themselves.
Well-conducted random and quota samples provide a broad approximation to the public, but there are all kinds of reasons why they might contain slightly too many of some groups of people, and slightly too few of others, so they are tweaked again.
What normally happens is that polling companies also ask respondents not only about their views, but about themselves too, and this information is then used to compare the sample with census statistics about the population.
The raw numbers from the poll are then adjusted slightly, up or down, to match the profile of the population being surveyed.
So if, for instance, a poll finds that, when its survey-work is complete, it has 100 members of a particular demographic group, but should have 110 of them (in a poll of, say, 1,000 or 2,000), then it will ‘weight’ the answers of that group so that each of those 100 respondents counts as 1.1 people.
This way, the published percentages should reflect the population as a whole.
Therefore opinion surveys today can USUALLY be relied on.
Before the election on May 7 to the Welsh Parliament/Senedd Cymru (WP/SC), for example, they were pretty much on the money.
FindOutNow gave the nationalist party Plaid Cymru (Plaid) 35 per cent, when the actual result was 35.4 per cent.
At an international level they should also be consulted, and show that Donald Trump’s war on Iran is incredibly unpopular, because it is hitting people in the pocket, and it may now affect the mid-term elections in November, when seats in the Congress are up for grabs.
The recent nonsense over Greenland too was reflected in (probably accurate) poor opinion poll numbers.
In a poll of more than 1,500 Americans conducted by YouGov between January 16 and 19, just 29 per cent of respondents approved of buying Greenland.
Only 38 per cent of all respondents polled earlier in January said the island was “very” or “somewhat important” to American security.
Support for acquisition through a full-scale invasion is even lower – at around four per cent.
So invariably polls can be trusted today, and get it correct about key events or people – but sometimes there have been blips in the past, like apparent popular support to bring back hanging, or in venerating Marat who supported terror!
Phil’s memories of his extraordinary award-winning career in journalism (including political, as well as polling stories like these) as he was gripped by the incurable disabling condition Hereditary Spastic Paraplegia (HSP), have been released in a major book ‘A GOOD STORY’. Order it now!
Tomorrow – a controversial plan to charge Cardiff employees for staff parking, has been highlighted by a former high-profile radio DJ with BBC CW (where Phil worked for 23 years), declaring that it “undermines the whole economic argument for moving from Llandaff”.
