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Pull Polling — an Alternative to Traditional Polling Methodology

Trying to make sense of a crazy world, with limited success mostly
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Slarti the White
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Pull Polling — an Alternative to Traditional Polling Methodology

#1

Post by Slarti the White »

Pull Polling


Traditional polling instruments, “horse-race” polls in particular, have significant limitations in determining preferences and consensuses amongst the groups being polled. The lack of any information regarding the certainty or importance of a choice makes it impossible to compare or correlate different polls, the limited number of choices available and choices to be selected can hide significant sentiment groups, and the bias inherent in the selection of polling questions means that there will always be some degree of “push” in traditional polls. In addition, lacking this information, the data is very sparse and provides no insight into why the poll subjects answer the way they do. These shortcomings are accepted as there is currently no alternative available.

Pull polling is an attempt to provide an option which doesn’t have these shortcomings. Instead of the polls “pushing” subjects into restricted categories and treating all answers in the same “box” as having the same weight, it allows the person being polled to “pull” the poll to record what is important to them. This is accomplished using a flexible and dynamic polling instrument. Flexibility, in this sense, means that participants would enter not just their preferences, but also the strength of the preference, how important it is to them, and their willingness to reconsider it. A pull poll is dynamic as the user can also add options if their choices are not available which will then be presented to those taking the poll later. Thus the poll becomes both broader and more detailed as more people participate, providing a tool to identify areas of importance, consensus, and potential for change.

One of the important principles in pull polling is that it “reverses the polarity”, so to speak. It is a tool designed to help leaders be more responsive to the group, to help individuals better express their positions on what is important to them, and to help the community identify consensus. As such, it will be most useful not in a “one-off” anonymous poll, but rather as a continually evolving database of responses from a community — where a person’s responses to different polls could be connected and someone could update their responses to a poll if their thinking changed. The idea is to take the power out of the hands of the leaders and the pollsters and put it into the hands of the group. The pollsters can’t control the framing because it grows organically, and the leaders are being told what is really important to the group rather than getting information on how to design soundbites to build their cult of personality. It is a methodology for collecting data about the group for the benefit of both the group and the individuals that comprise it.
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Notaperson
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Pull Polling — an Alternative to Traditional Polling Methodology

#2

Post by Notaperson »

Just a couple of quick reactions...

I'm having a hard time imaging how exactly a data collection instrument that is "flexible" and "dynamic" in the way you describe would actually work.
But I have a strong feeling it would be something viewed by many potential respondents as confusing and "too much trouble" to deal with. Never forget that it's all to easy for a person you want to engage to click that "X" in the top right corner of their browser.

And if I understand it correctly, there would be little standardization in questions, response choices, and so on. So it would be virtually impossible to generate numeric results, i.e., "60 percent of respondents say this, while 25 percent say...". This is something that clients tend to want - ideally from a representative sample (a whole other problem). If they don't want these, they want focus groups - which can be great for asking the kinds of deeper "why" questions that can't be done so well in polls.
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Ben-Prime
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Pull Polling — an Alternative to Traditional Polling Methodology

#3

Post by Ben-Prime »

My biggest up front question would be how you get the natural language processing advanced enough to de-dupe.

This may seem like a nerdy niche question, but I've lived it. At one of my two Foreign Service assignments thus far, one of the senior staffers was a bit a dive-into-the-weeds kind of person, and had me set up a poll form heavy in the raw text entry. Over 800 people participated, entering their thoughts on a key series of linked issues that were considered important by the Embassy's executive team at the time.

For one particular question, you would not believe how many different ways 800 people found to say nearly the same exact thing. I had to read all 800 entries and sort and provide context and it was brutal.

So my concern here is how you get the pull poll to recognize that when John talks about thing X using 5 words, and Maria talks about thing Y using a dozen words (or the other way around), *and none of the words are the same* they are both talking about the same thing regardless, you know? NLP is getting more advanced by the day, sure, but it does require some programming at the outset to learn the matches.
But the sunshine aye shall light the sky,
As round and round we run;
And the truth shall ever come uppermost,
And justice shall be done.

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TheNewSaint
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Pull Polling — an Alternative to Traditional Polling Methodology

#4

Post by TheNewSaint »

It would be a self-selecting poll, and have all the biases those have.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-selection_bias
humblescribe
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Pull Polling — an Alternative to Traditional Polling Methodology

#5

Post by humblescribe »

Jus' throwing this out there, well, cuz I am trying to understand this concept:

Of late, the Uniform CPA Examination is taken on computers. (Unlike in my day where we used pencil and paper.) The examiners started using dynamic questioning for both the multiple choice and short answer questions. The computers already knew the correct answers to those questions. The applicant would answer questions on a certain topic, like inventory. If the applicant answered several questions correctly, the computer would change to another area like leasehold accounting. Otherwise, the applicant might get one or two more questions on inventory before moving on. Then, on occasion, the computer would return to inventory maybe towards the end of the test.

So, would pull polling resemble this sort of dynamic? In other words, the system would be set up to anticipate a variety of answers and let the citizen direct the types of questions he receives based upon his answers? Maybe AI (artificial intelligence, not artificial insemination) would be used to cull the answers and try to dig deeper into the respondent's beliefs?
"Some cause happiness wherever they go; others whenever they go." O. Wilde
Slarti the White
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Pull Polling — an Alternative to Traditional Polling Methodology

#6

Post by Slarti the White »

Thanks for the great comments! I'm working on replies to the issues you have raised.
humblescribe
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Pull Polling — an Alternative to Traditional Polling Methodology

#7

Post by humblescribe »

One other thought that occurred to me this morning while walking our canine companions:

I think voting preferences need to be parsed in more detail. When Candidate X receives votes, what is the motivation behind those votes? I can think of a few plausible motives:

--Voters really like and embrace X.
--Voters think X is the lesser of two evils.
--Voters hate Candidate Y, so their vote for X is more of a referendum than actual support.
--Voters really don't give a damn, but they want to cancel a vote for Y because someone in their circle is a yuge supporter of Y, so their vote for X is more spite and malice.
--Voters vote a straight ticket regardless. As long as there is an R or D after the name, that is how I vote.

When the actual results are tabulated and compared to polling is when the people behind the scenes do the post-mortem. Do they really know why their candidate received the quantity of votes, or only that they received votes from various demographics?

To me this is like the old baseball adage after a player checks his swing, hits a weak pop up that slices beyond the reach of the shortstop and falls into no-man's land and squirts another 30 feet away while the batter winds up with a 150-foot double. "It looks like a line drive in the box score."
"Some cause happiness wherever they go; others whenever they go." O. Wilde
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