BOSTON — the future of polling is changing faster than journalists can keep up with, according to Spencer Kimball, associate professor at Emerson College, during a polling literacy workshop at the New England Region 1 Conference.
The conversation included Skittles — a common example of how survey responders are distributed within a given sample. Each Skittles color represents a different demographic. As sample size increases, the data’s margin of error shrinks to accommodate.
Journalists often include polling statistics in stories without adjusting for margin of error — overlooking the fact that results may vary, said Kimball.
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Demonstrating ethical sampling with skittles. Photo by Bryan Liu.
Kimball’s initial proposal for a survey research program was rejected by the administration 25 years ago. But after a successful test-run in his classroom, the Emerson College Polling Society emerged and has since grown into a reliable non-partisan data source.
Kimball’s polling center works partnerships with clientele like Nexstar Media — conducting about 60 electoral polls for over 200 media outlets annually nationwide. The center combines a two-fold automated system that collects data over landline phones with an online panel of participants.
For example, Kimball’s poll found that 52 percent of Las Vegas residents did not want to put taxpayer money into a new baseball arena for the Oakland A’s — and in response, residents are urging Mayor Carolyn Goodman to vote on this decision because they know the data will back them.
“Our poll is being used everywhere — from the A’s who said we don’t want to vote on this anymore to the mayor of Las Vegas saying we want to vote on this,” said Kimball.
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“A survey is a snapshot in time,” said Kimball. Photo by Bryan Liu
By working with students, Kimball learns new polling techniques from the next generation of media consumers — those who interact with new platforms like social media are the newest market for polling research. But too many pollsters from the old-school are reluctant to indulge.
“All these pollsters who tell us you can’t do it any other way, they call us and ask us how it works, I’m talking about the New York Times and CNN — because we’ve been doing the research for 10 years,” said Kimball.
One successful technique, called river sampling, invites responders to open a survey while they are already occupied with online tasks such as scrolling TikTok or watching YouTube. Kimball says he was inspired by Sasha Issenberg’s book, The Victory Lap, which describes how the Obama campaign in 2008 leveraged online polling into an election win after appealing to younger voters.
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Kimball describing the differences between polls and surveys. Photo by Bryan Liu.
Polls are meant to grow with their audience.
“If I don’t approach surveys this way, I might lose that 18-24 year old, and if you’re 25 and never took a survey before, you might never take one,” said Kimball.
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Bryan Liu, Emerson College
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