NEWS8 December 2015
All MRS websites use cookies to help us improve our services. Any data collected is anonymised. If you continue using this site without accepting cookies you may experience some performance issues. Read about our cookies here.
All MRS websites use cookies to help us improve our services. Any data collected is anonymised. If you continue using this site without accepting cookies you may experience some performance issues. Read about our cookies here.
Insight & Strategy
Impact magazine is a quarterly publication for MRS members. You can access Impact content on this website.
NEWS8 December 2015
UK — YouGov has released a report into what went wrong with the polling at this year’s General Election.
The report, authored by YouGov’s Anthony Wells and Doug Rivers, focuses on how politically interested people who respond to polls are, and how that impacts on the age of people in samples. “In my view it’s the core issue that caused the problems in May, it’s also the issue that is more likely to have impacted on the whole industry (different pollsters already have different age brackets) and the issue that more challenging to solve (adjusting the top age bracket is easily done),” says Wells.
“People who take part in opinion polls are more interested in politics than the average person. As far as we can tell that applies to online and telephone polls and as response rates have plummeted (the response rate for phone polls is somewhere around 5%) that’s become ever more of an issue. It has not necessarily been regarded as a huge issue though – in polls about the attention people pay to political events we have caveated it, but it has not previously prevented polls being accurate in measuring voting intention.
“The reason it had an impact in May is that the effect, the skew towards the politically interested, had a disproportionate effect on different social groups. Young people in particular are tricky to get to take part in polls, and the young people who have taken part in polls have been the politically interested. This, in turn, has skewed the demographic make up of likely voters in polling samples.”
The report can be accessed here.
Newsletter
Sign up for the latest news and opinion.
You will be asked to create an account which also gives you free access to premium Impact content.
What does effective charity marketing look like? Ian Gibbs of Data Stories Consulting and the @DMA UK examines best… https://t.co/Mm3Y922gul
Gekko partners with CloudArmy on neuroscience https://t.co/H3HVoPywM8 #mrx #marketresearch
Voxco adds three tools to its insights platform https://t.co/lTsB6ACI24 #mrx #marketresearch
The world's leading job site for research and insight
Hasson Associates
Quant Associate Director
£50000–59000
Resources Group
Qualitative Research Manager/Strategist – Central London – Leading Consultancy!
£38,000–£45,000 +benefits!
Resources Group
Research Director (Quantitative Evaluation) – Education Sector Research (Charity)
c. £60,000 base plus additional skills adjustment (to £8000)
Featured company
Town/Country: London
Tel: +44 (0)20 7490 7888
Kudos Research are leading providers of premium quality UK and International Telephone Data-Collection. Specialising in hard to reach B2B and Consumer audiences, we achieve excellent response rates and provide robust, actionable, verbatim-rich data. Methodologies include CATI, . . .
Related Articles
We have lots of exciting face-to-face and virtual #conferences coming up. What do you like to see on the programme?… https://t.co/sgv6pBkfJD
The post-demographic consumerism trend means segments such age are often outdated, from @trendwatching #TrendSemLON
1 Comment
John O'Brien
7 years ago
This report makes no sense to me. How does it explain the reason why polls consistently predicted a small Labour lead and this lead did not materialise?
Like Reply Report