The first pre-election poll, or straw vote ,as it was then called,was conducted by the Harrisburg Pennsylvanian before the 1824 presidential election.This straw vote and the many that followed it really registered nothing but local opinion.However, as communications improved and elections were won by closer and closer margins,newspapers and journals tried desperately to satisfy their readers curiosity in more reliable ways.
Before the 1928 elections,no fewer than eighty-five publications made private inquiries,generally by means of questionnairessent to subscribers and by telephone surveys.The principle common to all these inquiries was that they depended on quantity rather than quality;little effort was made to reach representatives of all segments of the population.Still,the erroneous belief persisted that the greater the number of questionnaires,the more accurate the results would be .The record was held by the American monthly Literary Digest,which sent out millions of postcards with short and pointed questions before each election,and received many hundreds of thousands of replies.In fact ,in 1932,the Literary Digests forecast was off by only 1 percent.
In view of such striking achievements,it for the young American journalist,George Gallup,to claim that large numbers were irrelevant,and that equally accurate or better predictions could be made with a small but carefully selected sample of the population and a small team of skilled interviewers.
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