Posts by Russell Brown
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Hard News: Where are all the polls at?, in reply to linger,
TL;DR — the expected effects on errors in support estimates arising from lower overall support rates (lower p, hence lower theoretical variance) and regional/demographic restrictions on support (hence lower effective sample size, and higher theoretical variance) seem in practice largely to cancel each other out in NZ data.
As I understand it, the big variance in different polling firms' practice is around how – and how hard – the call-centre workers push for a preference. That and intention to vote at all.
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Hard News: Where are all the polls at?, in reply to Tom Semmens,
According to Martyn Bradbury, over at the daily blog. Can anyone confirm if that is true? If so, I am getting in an extra supply of tea of biscuits for election night.
Yup. RNZ don’t get it any more for Colin James’s poll-of-polls.
Although bless you for wanting to fact-check Bomber :-)
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Hard News: Where are all the polls at?, in reply to Bart Janssen,
The polls are accurate for parties that poll close to 50%.
For smaller parties the polls are less accurate, hence the “surprising” results for NZ First etc.
Not really. NZ First won 8.66% of the vote. The last five polls: 6.6, 8, 8.4, 7.1, 8.
So three were very close and the other two fairly close. (And one was Ipsos, which seemed to consistently underrate NZ First.) That's not "horribly inaccurate".
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Hard News: Where are all the polls at?, in reply to Bart Janssen,
All polls in NZ suffer from biases and small sample sizes. They are always reported with bogus margins of error. And worst of all they are horribly inaccurate.
That last is the worst of their faults. If your sample fails to represent the entire population every time then you’d be an idiot to keep taking the same sample.
Um, no. Sample sizes for national polling in NZ are 750-1000 (Colmar Brunton is usually slightly over 1000). The typical sample size for US national polls is 1000. New Zealand sample sizes are not small by international standards.
And they're not really that inaccurate either. Let's look at 2014.
National's party vote: 47.04%. Last five polls before election day, in reverse order: 47.7, 45, 48.2, 44.4, 46.5.
Labour's party vote: 25.13. Last five polls 26.1, 25, 25.9, 25.6, 24.
I wouldn't call that "horribly inaccurate".
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Hard News: Where are all the polls at?, in reply to Gavin White,
On your last point Russell, there’s no way Reid surveyed all those people just for a preferred PM poll (which I strongly dislike mainly because they’re usually skewed to the incumbent, which is what is interesting about the NZ ones at the moment). There must be at least a vote coming, and on the numbers so far it’s bad news for the Maori Party.
Yep, they're polling the individual Māori electorates for Māori Television. When I linked to the story yesterday I missed that further down there was a voting intention question too, with 2500 responses, gathered from July 11 to August 17.
The preferred PM sample is smaller because (for obvious reasons) it only covers responses from August 1 onwards, when Ardern became leader. It would have been interesting if they'd published the Little results for comparison.
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Answering my own question, here's the story.
A big sample of 1350, which will surely have been culled from their individual electorate polls – so I presume Reid is doing those too, and not just tacking on a question.
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Oh, here's one I didn't see coming. Māori Television got a Reid Research question for Māori roll voters. Wonder what the sample size is?
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A useful comment on my Facebook from Gavin White (ex-UMR):
FYI I think Digipoll are out of business. Online polls are now the norm in Australia, and did very well at the 2016 Federal election in particular - compulsory voting helps with that. CATI surveys are getting prohibitively expensive, and as you know NZ media outlets don't have much cash. Robos have come in in Oz as the cheap alternative to CATI and proper online surveys, but they're indicative at best.
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Hard News: Friday Music: The Return of Disasteradio, in reply to Stupid,
USA solar eclipse is next Monday 21st August
Oops.
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Hard News: Friday Music: The Return of Disasteradio, in reply to Geoff Lealand,
That Me & Julio is lovely
Nice, huh? And really an authentic moment too. Good for her.
