Quote:
Originally Posted by MrWookie
My point isn't even that Trafalgar is bad. My point is that your standard for judging whether a polling outfit is good or bad is nonsensical. We know for a fact that certain polling outfits keep giving results that strongly favor one side, and yet they hang around even after elections when they were very wrong and nevertheless still consistently give results that strongly favor the same side. To think that a polling outfit would fade into obscurity based on a bad result doesn't line up with reality at all. In fact, conservative-leaning polling outfits seem to have a business model where they hang their hat on being one of only a handful that get things more right than the consensus when things break conservatives' way, even if that only happens rarely, rather than being in the middle of a large pack with consistently average accuracy. Trafalgar is not even unique in this regard.
But I didn't judge whether a polling outfit is good or bad. All I was saying was that Trafalgar and the other group, according to what their representatives said, had a different approach from most polling organizations to their questioning. If you look at my early posts in this thread, I was talking about how if questions are not carefully worded they can produce erroneous results -- response variance, response bias, and conditioning.
As for whether a particular business stays in business often has something to do with the quality of their product. I know this from personal experience as I've watched a number of publishers in our field of poker/gambling disappear.
But a good product can also have something to do with the need that is out there. If, for instance, as you point out, that polls which consistently lean certain ways have customers because these customers might want polls that lean certain ways, then in a sense they're putting out a good product for that customer.
Mason