NEWS28 February 2011
CANADA— The Marketing Research & Intelligence Association (MRIA) has taken out a full-page ad in the political weekly The Hill Times to tackle recent criticism of opinions polls as unreliable, inaccurate and far too prolific.
Headlined ‘There’s no margin of error on the truth’, the ad hits out at media articles that suggest a “crisis of confidence” in the industry and its abilities to accurately measure the opinions of Canadians.
At the root of the issue is a Canadian Press article, dated 13 February, in which pollsters including Harris-Decima’s Allan Gregg, Jaideep Mukerji of Angus Reid Public Opinions and Frank Graves of Ekos are quoted lamenting a proliferation of polls, a decline in standards and excessive competition that’s forcing prices lower and lower.
Other contributors to the piece accuse the media of being addicted to polls and criticise pollsters for feeding the habit.
The MRIA challenges the assumption that too many polls are a bad thing, arguing that “the more public polls are published in a democracy, the more its citizens become aware of the issues of the day”. Bad polls, the association says, are soon discredited by those conducted by reputable firms.
On the question of accuracy, the MRIA points to the industry’s success in calling the previous two elections. A PDF of the ad is available here.
Darrell Bricker and John Wright of Ipsos Reid also sought to answer the criticisms levelled at the industry by their colleagues in an open letter to the media.
“One misstatement,” they write, “is that political polls in Canada aren’t based on ‘true’ random samples so they are prone to error (supposedly, this is our ‘dirty little secret’). This statement is completely ridiculous. Nobody in the world does true random samples for political research. And nobody has ever conducted a random sample for a political survey in Canada, ever. True random samples take too long, are too expensive, and are overkill for the task at hand.”