Opinion Polling is a commonly utilised approach to social research and widely used in political discourse. It is a theory-centred approach which assumes a solid and replicable sample that offers good inference for the intentions and actions of a population. Dilemmas are of course created by this approach, as in the polling process often appears to have agency of its own, likewise the dynamics of social habits and societal composition make the estimation of effective and representative samples difficult.
address these dilemmas in three (3) parts:
1. Identify the technical methods and approaches undertaken in a recent Australian political poll: you should demonstrate your understanding of how the data was collected, the sample suitability and the confidence of results.
2. In your answer you should offer a substantive discussion on the research challenges of using large scale polling. In answering this question, reflect on:
1. the key challenges to the approach, as demonstrated by experience and predictive capacity;
2. how might these challenges arise in other fields of public policy development; and
3. what are the limitations and advantages of this type of technique of data collection.
Discuss the results as reported in the media, including a reflection on the way in which reporting and inference occurs in taking the polling data into the realm of political discourses.
