Quote:
Originally Posted by longsuffering
So the question is, with the invention of call display and call screening, are telephone polls still valid? Are telephone polls truly a random sampling?
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For polling companies that is the million dollar question. That industry is really at it's "change with the times or fall the way of the dinosaur" point, similar to what the Music Industry faced a few years ago.
This past US Election was the first event in what I think will be a major shake-up to the industry. Outfits which don't phone cell phones or used a sampling that was considerably dated were killed in the election - Gravis and Rassmussen come to mind. While other polls that combined cell phone and a better demographic sampling did a far better job. PPP and Google come to mind as being more accurate. And we're also talking about the US, where because of their electoral system, pollsters have a far more data to make informed guesses on sampling distribution, race, gender, etc.,
In Canada the best a pollster can do is go through the phone book and hope it's reliable.