I have a question about the website pollingpoint.com. They wouldn't respond to my email so here I am?

Question

I enjoy taking their polls and surveys, but I noticed something. I once completed a particular survey, and after that returned to the homepage. I accidentally clicked on the same survey again, and it gave me the option of taking the same one over again. Pardon me if I'm not too intelligent on polling issues, but wouldn't that allow a particular person to skew the results of a poll by just taking it over and over again? If I wanted to I could take the poll again and again and tilt the results in whatever favor I wanted. Something's fishy here. Would anyone like to fill me in?

Answer 1

Well hey, you say you dont know much about polling issues but you have, indeed, identified a major potential problem to those surveys! I take polls at pollingpoint.com as well and have noticed that they allow me to re-take a poll. Perhaps they have measures already in place to handle this. For example, your responses could be identified by a user name or your computer's address, and they may delete any subsequent re-takes of that poll under your name. Who knows. But if the data is allowed to go to the main data base then yes, I guess you could keep retaking it over and over again to skew the results. How many times would you have to retake it though, to counter the other pollers and to actually skew the results? Probably way too many for it to be worth your while.

I guess the issue here comes down to whether we can believe the results with a flaw like this. Well, actually you cant completely believe the results anyway.

Now the results are SUPPOSED to be generalized to the entire US...therefore, if there is a poll about how often you watch tv, the result of many people taking the poll should allow us to generalize to how much the average American (or teenager in the US, or girl in the US, etc) watches tv. That is the most general premise of all polls and surveys.

The problem with pollingpoint.com, though is that we really cant generalize to everyone in the US. For one, only people who have a computer and can access the website can technically take the poll! So from that we go from generalizing about the "average American" to generalizing about the "average American with computer access". Further, not everyone with computer access even knows about polling point, so that limits us even more. FURTHER STILL, people will usually only take a poll if they are interested in the topic or have firm opinions on the topic. So in the end, who are we generalizing to? What do the results of pollingpoint polls really tell us about the average American? Absolutely nothing.

So in general, I'd suggest just to take the polls if you have fun doing so (I do!) and dont really worry about the validity of the results they get. If you like doing polls try NPDOR, its another polling site that sends you emails when a new survey arrives and gives you points to enter into drawings. I like that one too.

Answer 2

Glitch in the programming, I too lke to hit the sites, and do a little "polling" but when that happens I just skip over it.

Answer 3

Not if your previous poll gets deleted by retaking it.