BBC Learnings · Section 1

Are opinion polls accurate

Predicting the future is not easy, but that's exactly the job of opinion pollsters

Level: B1 · 106 sentences

Transcript

  1. Predicting the future is not easy,
  2. but that's exactly the job of opinion pollsters
  3. researchers who ask people questions to discover what they think
  4. about certain topics.
  5. Often their aim is predicting which political party will win
  6. in an election by asking members of the public
  7. how they intend to vote.
  8. But predicting the future is never 100% accurate.
  9. And opinion polls don't always get it right.
  10. In 2016, few pollsters predicted a victory for Donald Trump
  11. over Hillary Clinton in the US presidential election.
  12. And in the 2020 US elections,
  13. most polls predicted Trump would lose to Joe Biden by a much
  14. larger amount than he actually did.
  15. These mistakes, sometimes called misfires
  16. when things do not work in the way intended,
  17. have damaged the reputation of opinion pollsters.
  18. In this programme we'll be taking a look
  19. into the opinion polling industry
  20. and of course learning some useful vocabulary as well.
  21. But first I have a question for you, Sam,
  22. and it's about another time when the opinion polls got it wrong.
  23. Few pollsters predicted that Britain would vote to leave the European Union
  24. in the 2016 Brexit referendum, which in the end it did.
  25. But what was the final split between those who voted to leave
  26. and those who wanted to remain?
  27. Was it a 51 leave to 49 remain,
  28. b 52 leave to 48 remain,
  29. or c 52 remain to 48 leave?
  30. I think it was b
  31. 52% voted to leave and 48% to remain.
  32. OK, Sam, I'll reveal the answer at the end of the programme.
  33. One of the biggest polling companies was founded by George Gallup.
  34. Born in 1901 on a farm in Iowa,
  35. Gallup was a student of journalism.
  36. He wanted to know people's opinion on a range of subjects
  37. and came up with a simple idea.
  38. Why not try asking them?
  39. Here's G. Elliot Morris, a data journalist from The Economist,
  40. explaining more to BBC World Service programme More or Less.
  41. And he publishes his dissertation on this,
  42. how to measure what people want, basically.
  43. And he gets hired by a much bigger advertising agency
  44. in New York called Young and Rubicam.
  45. And they basically give him a blank check to do their research,
  46. to figure out how to call people,
  47. how to talk to them, to figure out if they
  48. remember or liked a certain product,
  49. basically to figure out early methodologies in advertising.
  50. And then by 1931 or so, he's wondering...
  51. Well, if it works for toothpaste, why not politics?
  52. George Gallup tried to figure out what customers wanted to buy.
  53. If you figure something out, you finally understand it
  54. or find a solution to a problem
  55. after thinking about it a lot.
  56. Later he was hired by a New York advertising agency
  57. to find out people's opinion of consumer products like toothpaste and soft drinks.
  58. George was given a blank cheque
  59. an unlimited amount of money and freedom to do his job.
  60. At this time, polling was focused on consumer preferences, not politics.
  61. But asking people about their political views
  62. is a lot more complicated than asking them about toothpaste.
  63. Making accurate election predictions depends on polling a sample group of people
  64. who accurately represent the population as a whole.
  65. One of the reasons for pollsters' failure to predict Trump's election in 2016
  66. is that they didn't ask enough white, non-college educated voters.
  67. So polling is a very complex process,
  68. one which is never totally reliable,
  69. according to G. Elliot Morris, speaking again here
  70. to BBC World Services, more or less.
  71. If people were understanding this process that's generating all these polls,
  72. then they would understand polls as less sort of precise tools,
  73. tools that definitely can't offer the laser-like predictive accuracy we've come
  74. to expect from them.
  75. Then the difference between...
  76. Pollings, expectations and performance wouldn't be so stark.
  77. Opinion polls can estimate the outcome of an election,
  78. but they can't give us laser-like accuracy.
  79. If you describe something as laser-like,
  80. you mean it's very accurate and focused, like a laser.
  81. If people understand how hard it is to predict the future,
  82. they might be more realistic about how accurate opinion polls can be.
  83. Then differences between a prediction and the final result
  84. wouldn't be so stark obvious and easily visible, or harsh.
  85. Predicting the future is difficult,
  86. otherwise everyone would be a lottery winner by now.
  87. Maybe it's not opinion polls that are broken,
  88. but our desire to know the future that's the problem.
  89. OK, it's time to reveal the answer to my question about the Brexit referendum.
  90. I said the final result was 52% for leave
  91. and 48% for remain.
  92. Which was the correct answer?
  93. And another example of an opinion poll misfire a situation
  94. where something does not work as intended.
  95. OK, let's recap the rest of the vocabulary from this programme about opinion pollsters people
  96. who conduct polls asking the public
  97. their opinion on particular subjects, especially politics.
  98. If you figure something out, you finally understand it,
  99. or find the solution to a problem
  100. after thinking long and hard about it.
  101. If someone gives you a blank cheque,
  102. you have unlimited money and freedom to complete a task.
  103. When you describe something as laser-like...
  104. You mean that it's very accurate and precise.
  105. And finally, the adjective stark has several meanings, including obvious,
  106. harsh and plain.