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Sunday, April 16, 2006
Sun.Star Essay: Measuring up to it
By Erma M. Cuizon
YOU wonder how much opinion surveys affect your life and determine what you are, even while it’s been put together each time to see how you think and feel on just about anything in contemporary life.
Of course, we can’t talk much about the survey system, if at all; not the process throughout, even just to begin, not with the proper terms. In fact, we just came across the term “target population.”
WE could mistake the sample size calculator as ordinary calculator. It’s for survey takers. This machine indicates the sample size of the respondents needed to enable the firm to undertake a survey that would answer questions about certain aspects of living.
But this is not to talk about the kind of population needed for the survey. This, they say, is another ticklish thing. Get the right public or fail in the survey sampling. The product or service users, or the general public, or the young or old public, this depends on the topic of the survey.
Prime movers in business, media, the government, and political groupings would do anything just to get an inkling of how their end-users, the public, or the voters are doing and thinking. And the surveyed public becomes the object of use.
For one, it would be good to see where the business is going, how it’s faring. There’s a need to know how the buying public would take, say, newly discovered sardines with a dash of mint in it that could suggest to children they’re eating chewing gum. Instead of seeing a product consultant of sort and, another, and who else, why not conduct a survey? The best source of data to use to measure the market, they say, is an opinion survey.
If you can count how many people use your product, then you can decide whether to go on with it or shift.
Electronic media is always falling to pieces over the size of the audience it can muster, in the face of the rating madness. It’s not enough to see the roaring crowd. Measure it, they say. Hire a survey firm.
And the government is certainly anxious to know how the public is responding to projects that are supposed to be for it. Prove it’s doing great, show it, and show it one more time, through a survey it could swing its way.
If you knew how much chances there is for you to win a senatorial post, then you can decide how much more effort to put in it, or how much more money to throw in. The politician, however, doesn’t shift, unlike the business producer, the direction is on toward victory; he is even willing to refuse to see all indications of defeat and put down poll results that don’t make him happy.
But if you get the wrong respondents, you won’t get the information you badly need.
So we go to the “flaws” in surveys.
Survey firms, of course, know that their projects are used by politicians with hidden agendas. Drum up on their being a great friend of the people for the bandwagon effect. Or put a survey down by suggesting a biased hand in it.
By itself, a survey has its weaknesses, although it’s getting a kind of reputation to be the last word on anything. For one, the survey firm could really be biased. Usually in politics. It would be good to have, say, a cousin there, so the process would be determined with this input. And this bias could be strapped to the system itself, such as in the formation of the questions, or the choice of respondents.
But the bias could come naturally. The Filipino audience, especially in the towns, has a language different from the survey takers. An interviewee even probably listens with his own bias, or, in the culture of the Filipino’s hospitality, speaks according to what he thinks is expected of him by a friendly young man from the city.
How do you determine the kind of audience, the size to sample, the kind of language to use? These are good questions an onlooker could ask.
In media, poll results could be used for other purposes than to give the fair information.
Every aspect of the matter depends on how to go over bias or pretend to do so.
Of course, there’s always bias--–on the part of the users of the survey or the one conducting it, even in the one listening to the news on the results.
For Bisaya stories from Cebu. Click here. (April 16, 2006 issue)
Write letter to the editor.Click here.
Join the Sun.Star message board.Click here.
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