Scottish referendum polls
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Thank you for downloading More or Less from BBC Radio 4. Here's Tim Harford.
Hello and welcome to More or Less, the programme which reveals the secrets behind the numbers in the news and in life. This week, the triumph of Countdown. MUSIC and the curse of Strictly Come Dancing. But first, we bring this programme to you amid a flurry of Scottish referendum poll results. Yes leads in Scots poll shock. The Sunday Times headline last weekend, as it published an internet opinion poll conducted by YouGov, which showed the Yes campaign was ahead for the first time, by 51% to 49% when the Don't Knows were excluded – there was pandemonium in the media, a sharp reaction on financial markets, and the leaders of the three big Westminster parties, each of which supports the continuation of the United Kingdom, cancelled Prime Minister's questions and dashed to Scotland in an attempt to shore up the Better Together campaign.
But then, three days later... Hello, Ruth. Hi, Tim. A new poll was published showing the Better Together side was six points ahead, excluding the don't-knows, which is a pretty solid margin, well above the reported margin of error.
Two days passed and then low.
Another YouGov internet poll showing this time the no vote in the lead. And an ICM telephone poll for The Guardian also showing the Better Together campaign ahead, but only by two points, which is within the margin of error. And so the polling continues.
So what's going on? What are the polls really showing us? How are they conducted? And are they reliable enough that they should be causing these political and financial aftershocks?
It's important to understand something about these polls.
How did the flurry of Scottish referendum polls differ and spark political reaction?
Many of them, including, as you've mentioned there, Tim, the Sunday Times YouGov poll that caused all the fuss, are internet polls.
Now, usually when we think of opinion polling, we imagine phoning people up or knocking on their doors and trying to get a random sample of the population at large. But internet polls work quite differently. I asked Anthony Wells of YouGov to explain.
Traditional polling is the theory behind it is all about trying to get a random sample. So you go to the whole of the country in some way from, you know, telephones or addresses or whatever and get a random group of people and they will, by the laws of probability, reflect the national population. Internet panel obviously isn't like that. It's a very different theory behind it. What you're doing is almost building a model. of the British population. So it's got the correct number of people of each gender, the correct spread of age, the correct spread of social class, the correct spread of political viewpoints who are willing to take part in surveys for a small payment. So if you've got 300,000 people and you know you're a bit short of little old ladies, then you'll spend your time running recruitment campaigns to try and get more little old ladies on your panel so you can build up representative samples more easily.
Just to clarify that more or less does not endorse the use of the little old lady cliche, Anthony, but... Just sticking with it, hypothetically, the little old ladies who answer internet polls, how do you know that they are representative of little old ladies as a whole?
Well, in some ways they won't be. Little old ladies who are on the internet are more likely to be affluent, for example. But those are things we can wait for and control for. What we can't control for is, for example, they're also likely to be more au fait and more comfortable with technology. And those things are just inescapable.
In a nutshell then, surveys of an internet panel need quite a bit of tweaking to make them reliable.
And that tweaking is based on historical experience. And because the referendum is pretty much unprecedented, we don't have much historical experience.
And the polls are so close, Anthony Wells says he can't be sure what the result will be. But he says he is certain that in the weeks leading up to last Sunday's YouGov poll, he saw a move towards yes.
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Chapters
4 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–1:45
2
How did the flurry of Scottish referendum polls differ and spark political reaction?
1:45–9:05
3
What are the differences between internet panel polls and traditional random-sample polls?
9:05–13:01
4
How do pollsters adjust online samples and what are the limits for the Scottish referendum?
13:01–27:58