The first time I was on the receiving end of a public opinion poll, the interviewer asked me a lot of questions about a congressman I didn’t know. Not until the end, when my response to her request for my zip code elicited a l-o-o-o-n-g pause, did I realize that she had somehow accidentally called the wrong state.
The second time, the interviewer asked me if I were connected with survey research in any way, and when I told him my job, he hung up on me. Loudly.
The third time, the survey comprised a bunch of open-ended questions about a president I didn’t like, and, boy, did I have a lot to say. Unfortunately, I couldn’t remember any of it under that kind of pressure, so a lot of “don’t knows” got recorded.
Until last month, there was no fourth time. Aside from the odd marketing firm wanting to know what I think about cars I have never heard of, I have for the most part been one of those people you’re always reading about whom the pollsters never call. This was always a grave disappointment to me because, despite my less than impressive track record with them, I love responding to surveys.
Now, let me hasten to say that this little kink has nothing to do with professional interest. Before ever I became involved with pollsters and their ilk, I always jumped at chances to voice my opinions to strangers. For one thing, it was safer than sharing them with friends and relations (one sibling in particular has a way of going for the jugular that makes you want to wear Kevlar turtlenecks). For another, there was the sense that my thoughts might actually be applied somewhere beyond my dinner table, and maybe even do some good.
It seems to me that there must be an awful lot of people who feel the same way. So many will express their opinions at the drop of a hat—calling in to radio talk shows, arguing politics in bars, sending comments to blogs, whipping out their cell phones to vote for the next American Idol. The polling community in recent years has put a lot of energy and effort into trying to determine why people won’t respond to public opinion surveys. I think it might be worth finding out why they do. The Council for Marketing and Opinion Research has made a good start. According to Patrick Glaser, writing in this month’s issue of Public Opinion Pros, CMOR is in the process of creating an outreach program with the slogan, “Your Opinion Counts,” in an effort to educate the media and the public and reverse the unrelenting downward trend in survey response.
What impresses me about this endeavor is its emphasis on the positive. For a long time now, I have watched the polling profession engage its issues with a seriousness that borders on the grim. Just these past few weeks, a considerable tempest blew up over push polling after Republican telemarketers used a series of pseudo-survey questions to steer voters toward their candidates.
These discussions are necessary and important. They also have been going on in essentially the same vein for years. They put the profession on the defensive, trying to prove its worth by emphasizing others’ worthlessness, issuing warnings and advisories that keep the spotlight on what the public should avoid about polling rather than how it might participate in it constructively.
Meanwhile, the public rarely hears anything positive. Nobody is telling them: Somebody wants to know what you have to say about important things. Somebody wants to give you an opportunity to increase your part in the democratic process. Somebody has a proven, tested, scientific means of harvesting your opinions in a way that might do more good than debating them with the driver of your cab.
Or maybe that somebody is telling them these things, just not in any place or any way that they are likely to listen to it.
So bring on the public service announcements and the newspaper ads. Play the jingles and hand out the bumper stickers. Make people see that there is something really rather cool about being a survey respondent. I am no marketing expert, but surely there is some way to appeal to the sense of civic duty, intellectual interest, and, yes, narcissism that make Americans want to be heard. Let’s figure out what they are, and do them.
For reasons I don’t entirely understand, this October just past, I was asked to take part in three public opinion polls—equal to the grand total of my experience for the previous two decades.
Of course, I complied with all of them. I concentrated on the questions with an intensity that made the phone get warm. I heard a little voice in the back of my head steadily rejoicing, “I’m-in-a-poll-I’m-in-a-poll-I’m-in-a-poll.” One interviewer sounded almost pathetically relieved to have reached someone so obviously thrilled to be talking to him, and I wondered what kind of night he’d been having. For a moment, I was tempted to say, “Hey, I’m into polling, and I know how tough this can be,” or “Tell your boss ‘Lisa says hey.’”
But I didn’t. I didn’t want to risk getting hung up on again, and maybe disqualified from the poll. I wanted my opinion to count and be counted. I’ll bet lots of other people do, too; they just haven’t been convinced of it yet.
—Lisa Ferraro Parmelee, Editor
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