Some additional items of interest from the AAPOR conference
Peter Coy of Businessweek was also on hand and filed some commentary. One point he emphasized, that I neglected in yesterday’s post, was the steps the exit pollsters plan to take to avoid future errors:
On May 14 in Miami Beach, the pollsters laid out their plan of action in a forum at the annual meeting of the American Association for Public Opinion Research. They said they hope to prevent leaks of exit-poll data, shrink the exit-poll questionnaire so more voters will be willing to complete it, get permission for interviewers to stand closer to the exits to catch more voters on their way out, and improve the recruiting and training of the interviewers.
Will Lester of the Associated Press was also on hand and filed a similar story on Saturday’s exit poll presentation:
Better training of interviewers to get a proper sample of voters after they cast ballots will be key to improving the performance of exit polls, one pollster who handled the 2004 election surveys said Saturday.
Finally, Lester also reported on a newly updated research on mobile-phone only households from the Center for Disease Control’s National Health Interview Survey. Their study showed:
Slightly more than 6 percent of households do not have a traditional landline phone, but do have at least one wireless phone. About 5.5 percent of adults have only a mobile phone.
But not for copyright law, I’d be tempted to quote these stories in full. Read them all.
