Published in Crikey, June 13 2007
7. Galaxy’s light dims
Peter
Brent from Mumble
Elections writes:
Rumours flew yesterday, here in Crikey and also on Bryan Palmer's Oz Politics, that the Galaxy poll taken in Queensland on the weekend (published in News Ltd tabloids) was a little dodgy.
The charge was that Galaxy had first asked respondents questions that encouraged negative feelings about the prospect of a Rudd Prime Ministership, and then asked how they would vote. The cited evidence was friends of friends who had been phoned by the pollster.
There are
two issues here. One is the ordering of questions. It is an absolute no-no for
pollsters to ask for voting intention anywhere other than at the beginning of a
political poll. This is so they remain "unpolluted". Any pollster
caught transgressing thus would go straight to market research purgatory.
The good news is that Galaxy always does ask for voting intentions first, and
did on this occasion. The confusion may have come from the fact that the survey
asked about both state and federal politics.
The Galaxy questions dealt with, in this order:
- Federal voting
- Federal issues
- State voting
- State issues
And so
respondents were asked about federal issues before state voting intentions.
The other matter was the questions themselves, which were rightly excoriated in
Crikey yesterday
by Irving Saulwick and Denis Muller.
In their excellent recently published book on public opinion, Divided
Nation: Indigenous Affairs and the Imagined Public, academics Murray Goot
and Tim Rowse write that "[w]hile the press determines the issues that the
polls are to cover, it is the polling organisations that craft the questions.”
Sadly, while that was probably once true, it ain't necessarily so any more.
These days, market researchers often fall over themselves to conduct political
opinion polls for newspapers. The PR, cascading around all corners of the media,
is just too alluring.
Often the pollsters work at cost price or below.
And some, it seems, allow the newspapers to influence the wording of questions.
This is a
tricky area. The papers can argue that they pay the bill and so call the shots.
It is up to market researchers to stand firm and maintain the integrity of their
product. This may be easier said than done with News Ltd editors - not a species
known for conceding the other's point of view.
But as Saulwick and Muller showed yesterday, others in the industry do notice
these things. And they may not like it.
[Read Saulwick/Muller]
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