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Is Strategic Vision Cooking the Books?

Forums: Politics, Polling
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engineer
 
Reply Wed 21 Oct, 2009 02:39 pm
Nate Silver over at 538.com has suspected the the polling organization Strategic Vision has been putting out bogus polls for a while. He's done a couple of articles about it, including this one. SV asked 1000 Oklahoma students ten very simple history questions and reported that only 2.8% of the students could get 6 or more questions correct. Nate did his typical number crunching showing why this is an unusual result, but he also asked a very simple question: Do we really believe there is not a student in OK who could get 8, 9 or even all 10 of these questions correct? What do you think? Is Strategic Vision cooking the books?
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Type: Discussion • Score: 0 • Views: 1,388 • Replies: 7
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Gala
 
  1  
Reply Thu 22 Oct, 2009 08:59 am
My alarms go up when I see a) polling b) Kentucky c)education.

Most people, especially from other parts of the country, would automatically not question the results, because of the stereotypes. For this reason, maybe the results aren't false so much as where they took the sample from.
Merry Andrew
 
  2  
Reply Thu 22 Oct, 2009 10:59 am
@engineer,
It has been said a million times, so I might as well say it for the one million and first time:

There are three kinds of liars: 1) plain liars,2) damned liars and 3) statisticians.
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engineer
 
  1  
Reply Thu 22 Oct, 2009 02:40 pm
@Gala,
But only 23% knew that the first President was Washington? Not a single person out of a 1000 got more than seven questions right on a very simple test? The analysis that really got me was where Nate mathmatically modeled the results assuming each question was random and got almost a perfect match to the reported results. Real like doesn't work that way. Either you know your stuff and will do very well or you don't and will bomb. I think Nate is on to something here.
Gala
 
  1  
Reply Fri 23 Oct, 2009 11:24 am
@engineer,
I see what your saying. So what's the motivation for not being truthful with the results?
engineer
 
  1  
Reply Fri 23 Oct, 2009 01:27 pm
@Gala,
Saves a lot of money if you can just make up some results and everyone takes your word. SV is the only major polling outfit that doesn't discuss its methodology. All the others tell you if they weight the numbers, how they select their sample population, etc.
Gala
 
  1  
Reply Tue 27 Oct, 2009 05:15 am
@engineer,
Well, we've become a culture that prefers to be vague and distracted, so who needs silly facts to back up a study?
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engineer
 
  1  
Reply Mon 9 Nov, 2009 07:24 am
Turns out that some in OK thought that survey was bogus and decided to do their own. When the exact same survey was done in one district with all seniors, the average score was 78, not 23. It's pretty clear that Strategic Vision is falsifying data. The sad part is they got this far. Since they've been outed, they have completely stopped posting political polls.
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