SOCIOL 1101H Lecture Notes - Lecture 7: Response Bias, The Literary Digest, Alf Landon
1 Feb 2017
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Questionnaires ( mail-in, self administered, internet, phones) Scientific surveys are randomly assigned whereas normal survey are not random. With a modest size, surveys can provide a reasonable estimate of the population. Because of random sampling, the sample size can be significantly low. Random sampling: every person in the sample has the same chance of being in the survey. The literary digest predicted his win in the 1936 presidential election. They drew from a sample of 10 million ballot predictions. The subscribers to the digest were disproportionately wealthy and alf landon supporters. Gallup predicted the same election with a fdr win. Response bias: people do not always want to give some information out. Strengths: easy to administer, best way to generalize to the larger population, standardization, collect information on things that cannot be directly observed, face to face and open ended questions allow for probing questions.
