
It also raises the possibility that people who do not belong in a U.S. This introduces the risk that some people will answer not with their own views but instead with answers they believe are likely to please the poll’s sponsor. It is a consequence of the field’s migration toward online convenience samples of people who sign themselves up to get money or other rewards by taking surveys. While some challenges to polls are ever-present (e.g., respondents not answering carefully or giving socially desirable answers), the risk that bad actors could compromise a public opinion poll is, in some respects, a new one. Open-ended answers show that some respondents answer as though they are taking a market research survey (e.g., saying “Great product” regardless of the question). While 78% of bogus respondents reported approving of President Donald Trump’s job performance, their approval rating of the 2010 health care law, also known as Obamacare, was even higher, at 84%. Critically, these bogus respondents are not just answering at random, but rather they tend to select positive answer choices – introducing a small, systematic bias into estimates like presidential approval. 1 A new study by Pew Research Center finds that online polls conducted with widely-used opt-in sources contain small but measurable shares of bogus respondents (about 4% to 7%, depending on the source). public opinion, such as the President’s approval rating or support for Democratic presidential candidates, are conducted using online opt-in polling. More than 80% of the public polls used to track key indicators of U.S. The study included more than 60,000 interviews with at least 10,000 interviews coming from each of the six online sources. One of the address-recruited samples comes from the Pew Research Center’s American Trends Panel.
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We compared data from six online sources used for public polling, including three prominent sources of opt-in survey samples, one crowdsourcing platform, and two survey panels that are recruited offline using national random samples of residential addresses and surveyed online.
