Nilgiri
BANNED
- Joined
- Aug 4, 2015
- Messages
- 24,797
- Reaction score
- 81
- Country
- Location
From where the samples were taken, what % do they represent?
How was the analysis done? Where they politically biased?
Who took part? Age group?
How did they filter out those with repeated accounts? or those with clicking habits?
How would a yes/no be politically biased? The bias would come by the TOI online readers being a particular subset of Indian population. There are no metrics regarding those since that would require a completely separate study, and then you have to correlate and create coefficients for correction etc. You lose the whole utility of doing an online survey.
This is the tradeoff between doing things quickly/cheaply as to more thoroughly. But the exact margin of bias is also unknown. In the end we have a "number"...kinda take it or leave it.
This brings up a conversation a bunch of us had about poverty rate measurement in India. A more detailed comprehensive survey method compared to the one before has created much interest from WB given the impact it had on the absolute poverty rate in India at: What state in India does what best? | Page 3
But that is not a binomial yes/no so it has many degrees of freedom (and variable measurement) for such a difference to happen in the first place.
As for how the "analysis" was done? There was no "analysis"....just a clear tally counter for yes and no's running on some server.
As for the who? We don't know, online polls are anonymous.
Repeated polling, I personally am not sure how they weed them out. Probably implementation of some IP based cookie. If its something more secure....it would be an IP logger + filter with some sort of firewall to detect poll spamming etc.
Both can be circumvented to some degree if you know how (cookie dump and proxy/VPN respectively)....if you really want to know I can test it for a TOI poll....or maybe another member already knows.
As for how many people are knowledgeable enough + have enough time/motivation to engage in this "cheating" ...who knows for sure. I would assume not many....and TOI may factor this in already in its results too.