The Growing Gap Between Landline And Dual Frame Election Polls

Introduction

The selected article “The Growing Gap between Landline and Dual Frame Election Polls” (Keeter, Christian and Michael Dimock) is about the survey conducted by Pew Research. This survey was conducted in 2010 to determine the gap between the polls conducted among the users of “Landline, Cell Phones, and Dual Frame.” With the help of this survey, Pew Research Centre” is able to state which party is progressing among the people of America. Also, what is the margin of success of political parties? The lead of “Republicans and Democratic” is clear from this article as we can easily find which party is famous among the “Landline Respondents, Cell Phone Respondents and Both Respondents.”

This article discusses the gap in the tween growth using the statistics that are provided by “The Pew Research Centre.” There are some Americans who prefer cell phones, and this trend is growing very fast, so it was necessary to conduct a survey considering both users to find that what is the opinion of respondents of these devices about the elections. This article has stated the answers to this question using many statistical tables. The results also show which president was more famous among the different responses. The basic purpose of this survey was to determine the growing gap between “Landline and Dual frame users” which has answered many questions including the one that the likely voters are doubled than in 2008 polls.

How Was The Survey Conducted?

The survey was conducted by following 6 Pew Research Centres (Keeter, Christian and Michael Dimock). The survey includes interviews via telephone, and these interviews were conducted among adults aged 18 and older 18. All of the adults belonged to the United States. This survey covers the dates and data fields, with their respective statistics described in Table 1 and Table 2. The first one is for registered, and the latter is for likely voters.

Table 1 Data Set for different Survey including the Number of Registered Voters on Different.

Table 2 Data Set for different Survey including the Number of Likely Voters on Different

This survey divided the population into two major categories: “Registered” and “Likely” voters. The registered voters are those who only said that they are registered, but the likely voters confirmed that they would cast a vote on election day. The term likely refers to the people who commit that they will cast a vote on election day (Likely voter). The above-stated survey was successfully conducted under the supervision of the following institutes;

1. “Princeton Survey Research Associates International” directed the survey, and data were collected by “Princeton Data Source and Abt/SRBI Inc.” for the period of “Late Oct.”
2. “Mid-Oct, Sep, Aug and Mar survey was also directed by “Princeton Survey Research Associates International,” but this data was collected by “Princeton Data Source.”
3. Jun survey was conducted under the direction and coordination of Abt/SRBI, Inc.

The interviews were arranged on the telephone only in English for the “Mid-Oct” and “Late Oct” surveys. However, Spanish was also used with English for conducting the interviews in other surveys. The cell and landline numbers were obtained from “Survey Sampling International”, which provides research data solutions in the global market (Data Solutions and Technology for Market Researchers). The weight of the population is given in Table 3, and this data is based on the “2009 National Health Interview Survey” (2009 National Health Interview Survey).

Table 3 Percentage of phone status and usage-based weighting

Results

First of all, this survey provides a general result in which we can determine the popularity of either party in congressional elections and either president in the presidential election, as shown in Figure 1

Figure 1 Congressional Polls on Landline and Cell (2010)

Figure 2 Presidential Polls on Landline and Cell (2008)

And Figure 2. These results also mention that “Republic” has a lead in both categories of landline only and landline plus cell combined respondents. Republic is ahead of the Democratic by a margin of +7.5 for “Landline and Cell Combined respondents” and +12.5 points for “Landline, Only” respondents. The other valuable result is given in Table 1.

Table 4 Likely and Registered Landline and Landline plus Cell Combined Votes for Republic and Democratic Parties in Congressional Elections

Their results show that the Republic has a visible margin over the Democrats. We can see from the other results in Table 5 that the Republic has a clear lead in the congressional polls of the survey over both landline and cell combined and landline samples.

Table 5 Congressional Polls Votes through Landline Only, Cell Only, Dual Landline and Cell

Another result shows that all the age groups people have chosen “Republic” over “Democratic.”

Determination Of Margin Of Error

The margin of error present in the data was necessary to determine because the groups of respondents were overlapping. The combined sample of “Landline and Cell” overlapped with the “Landline Only” sample, so it was necessary to conduct the significance tests. These significance tests are conducted using computer software and take into account the weight effect of the sample. For registered and likely voters, the expected marginal error is calculated by keeping the confidence interval 95% for both samples, including “Landline plus Cell” and “Landline Only.” The results are displayed in

Table 6 Margin of Error (Add or Subtract)

References

“2009 National Health Interview Survey.” 13 July 2010. NHIS Survey Description . 9 April 2018. <ftp://ftp.cdc.gov/pub/health_statistics/nchs/dataset_documentation/nhis/2009/srvydesc.pdf>.

Data Solutions and Technology for Market Researchers. 2018. 9 April 2018. <https://www.surveysampling.com/about/>.

Keeter, Scott, Leah Christian and Michael Dimock. “The Growing Gap between Landline and Dual Frame.” 22 November 2010. Pew Research Center. http://www.pewresearch.org/2010/11/22/the-growing-gap-between-landline-and-dual-frame-election-polls/. 9 April 2018.

Likely voter. 9 April 2018. <https://www.polyas.com/election-glossary/likely-voter>.