An Olympic poll going around

To provide the pollsters with an idea of what the average opinion on a subject is.

I can read things into polls, but in the end, as long as they are not push polls, they are good things. These questions seemed fair enough.

Or perhaps you don't like people knowing you opinion.

Your age can have a pretty dramatic impact on your beliefs. See: any opinion poll in the last 10 years - those that are 65+ have a different mindset than those 18-24.

If you don't like being surveyed, then politely decline. Otherwise, let the poor people doing the survey do their job and attempt to get reasonable data.

If you follow fivethirtyeight.com during the election season you would know that the way to get an accurate representation of a larger population from a poll (a pretty small sample size in relation) is to properly weight the responses you get. A simple example is that if 8% of your target population is 65+ and your poll of 1,000 people in the state turns out with 12% in that category then you would reduce the weight of those responses accordingly to get the more accurate overall response rate of the population.

Let's take another one. A lot of telephone polls require land lines but most young adults rely solely on cell phones and those younger adults who do have them skew much more to the conservative end of the political spectrum. The polls that showed Obama losing in 2008 often didn't correct for this and so you'd see polls that showed younger Americans favoring McCain which was not accurate as the exit polling results showed (Rasmussen comes to mind as they are often "wrong to the right" as it were). Fivethirtyeight.com doesn't even take any polls themselves, they dive into the raw data sets of other polls and then apply their own corrections/adjustments to them and usually come up with much more reliable results (as shown with the actual elections results & exit polling).

So, when you say it's none of their business you're basically answering a poll for nothing because they really won't be able to use your data set in a way that will give an accurate result. So, you can screech about the lack of "true equality" but that doesn't take away from the fact that there are distinct demographic groups within any population and their probable answers may differ to any given question. Good polls understand that and make adjustments accordingly to get a more accurate result.

While left-ish Republicans may be extinct, there are still (somewhat) moderate ones here and there -- and there are certainly plenty of conservative Democrats.

(edited)

See below. ;-}

Writes the conservative Democrat.

I said basically. It'd still make sense to roll them into 1, or at least not stick 3 questions between them.

I've had a landline for the past couple of years, because I work from home a couple of days every week and don't want to burn cell minutes on endless conference calls. Even I don't know the number for it.