Opinion Poll Simulation

Nigel Henry
June 20, 2015

Perceptions of Opinion Polling

People don't trust polls

Conceptually, it may seem counterintuitive that the views of a small sample (for example less than 1,000) can accurately estimate the views of tens of millions of people.

This leads to poor perception of public opinon polls.

Perceptions of Opinion Polling

This is how sampling error is usually taught…

Error Equation

Boring!

Learn by Doing

The user starts with an acutal population, of known distribution

population
   DEM    REP 
499671 500329

He gets to see the actual results of the (few) people that he sampled

poll
DEM REP 
305 295

Comparing he sees that with just 600 responses, he has approximated the population within 0.04

poll
  DEM   REP 
0.508 0.492

User Friendly

The app is learner-friendly, so that one can see the effects of

  • Changing the sample size
  • Polling different underlying populations
  • Running the poll multiple times on the same population