May 2011
Beginner
384 pages
10h 48m
English
Content preview from Statistics For Dummies®, 2nd Edition
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Chapter 16
Polls, Polls, and More Polls
In This Chapter
- Realizing the impact of polls and surveys
- Going behind the scenes of polls and surveys
- Detecting biased and inaccurate survey results
Surveys are all the rage amid today's information explosion. Everyone wants to know how the public feels about issues from prescription drug prices and methods of disciplining children to approval ratings of the president and ratings of reality TV shows. Polls and surveys are a big part of American life; they're a vehicle for quickly getting information about how you feel, what you think, and how you live your life, and they're a means of quickly disseminating information about important issues. Surveys highlight controversial topics, raise awareness, make political points, stress the importance of an issue, and educate or persuade the public.
Survey results can be powerful, because when many people hear that “such and such percentage of the American people do this or that,” they accept these results as the truth, and then make decisions and form opinions based on that information. But in fact, many surveys don't provide correct, complete, or even fair or balanced information.
In this chapter, I discuss the impact of surveys and how they're used, and I take you behind the scenes of how surveys are designed and conducted so you know what to watch for when examining survey results and how ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.