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asdff • today at 4:31 PM • 2 replies • view on HN

No matter how they adjust demographic factors they cannot control for the willingness to respond to polls at all. They are always subsetting this weird population set that shares that strange variable of being willing to spend ten plus uncompensated minutes with a spam call pollster.


Replies

mjdv • today at 4:38 PM

> they cannot control for the willingness to respond to polls at all

Why not? If they poll the same question (e.g. political party) repeatedly (e.g. in many elections) eventually you could build some kind of model of which parties poll-answerers are more likely to skew towards, or how much they shift compared to non-answerers. Not fundamentally a different process from other ways of removing bias from polls.

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qrobit • today at 4:37 PM

> [...] they cannot control for the willingness to respond to polls at all.

I believe this is not true, because at least ESS (European Social Survey) corrects for non-response, although how exactly is beyond my understanding of survey analysis. Each country reports the response rate as well. See [^1] section 3. Although ESS is much larger survey than simple opinion poll, there are political affiliation questions too (`^prtv.*$` variables).

[^1]: https://www.europeansocialsurvey.org/sites/default/files/202...

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