ProLog

When only two thirds of Americans can name the Vice President of the United States or their own state’s Governor, it seems little use to do any polling of public opinion at all.  With public opinion formed largely by 10 second sound bites and Daily Show skits, it seems opinions can be molded to reach any conclusion a media outlet wants to support.

To combat the public’s ignorance of today’s complex issues, and the faulty polling data it creates, Stanford’s James Fishkin developed a polling method he coined Deliberative Polling.  In Deliberative Polling, respondents are first polled on a series of questions about the issues of the day, but then are asked to participate in a series of moderated discussions that explore the subject areas in a thorough but balanced fashion. The respondents are polled again and their answers are compared before and after the discussion.

Proponents of Deliberative Polling such as psychologist and noted eldercare authority Ira Rosofsky point out that a well-informed sample population can return drastically different responses than an uninformed one, particularly on such current topics as healthcare.  In fact the effect of the deliberative nature of this method can be measured by comparing the difference in the before and after polls.

There is of course, a catch.  While it may be possible to conduct a thorough investigation of a subject before re-polling the respondents, it is quite difficult to be simultaneously thorough and balanced.   In fact, a good rule of thumb in the polling world is that the less you discuss the topic with the respondent, the more balanced the questions are likely to be.  Every word you add to the polling question (or setup) increases the chance that you’ll introduce a bias into the poll.  Furthermore, there is the difficulty of unringing the bell.  Once the question has been asked, you have planted a seed in the respondent’s mind that is difficult to remove, regardless of how much discussion you conduct afterwards.

So while Deliberative Polling shows promise, we won’t be doing any of it at Proloquor.net.  Instead, we plan to let our polls take their natural course, and will resist the siren’s song of Informing the Public.  Let’s hope the public is up to the task.