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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | Dear opinion pollsters: In Karnataka, there was an utter disregard for basic standards -Rahul Verma

Dear opinion pollsters: In Karnataka, there was an utter disregard for basic standards -Rahul Verma

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published Published on May 17, 2018   modified Modified on May 17, 2018
-ThePrint.in

Political science departments can contribute a lot by introducing graduate level courses on research methods. This will help understand the findings of a poll.

Dear Friends (if I may call you so),

I am one of you. I share your nervousness about forecasting an election, almost go sleepless the night before the counting day, and jump in joy when we manage to correctly predict an election outcome, and through a heartbreak when the gap between prediction and the final outcome is unbelievably large. After our continued failure in predicting electoral outcomes (except in elections in which the direction of results was clear before the voting day), the forecasts about Karnataka results have deeply troubled me.

While many of us went gaga over how close our predictions were to actual results, the truth is that there was an utter disregard for some basic standards that we should uphold. Let me say this upfront: This letter is not directed against any individual pollster or polling agency.

There are two questions that I wish to address in this letter. First, why the forecasts on 12 May were all over the place? Second, why election forecasting should be done with rigour and taken seriously? All pollsters, whether they had a sample size of 1,000, 5,000 or 50,000 proudly declared in the TV studios that their margin of error was plus minus three. In simple terms, what this means is that if the poll estimates that a party would get 50 per cent, it may get something between 47 and 53 per cent. Getting into the detail of margin of error is a bit complicated, so for general readers, hundred plus years of research in statistics says that all surveys have an error (noise) and only with some level of confidence, can we provide a ball park range for the estimate.

And this was the beginning of why I, who fancies himself as a pollster, is disappointed at the state of affairs. How can the margin of error remain same — plus minus two/or three, irrespective of the sample size? The error is dependent upon sample size. The larger the sample size, the smaller is the margin of error.

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ThePrint.in, 16 May, 2018, https://theprint.in/opinion/dear-opinion-pollsters-in-karnataka-there-was-an-utter-disregard-for-basic-standards/59097/amp/?__twitter_impression=true


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