Poll Administration

In class today we discussed administering polls. In my poll design for class I decided to use self-administered polls through the mail. This is the cheapest way of administering a poll. It also provides participants with the opportunity to take their time, read through the poll before answering the questions (which decreases the negative aspects of question order), and they can answer the questions in their own privacy which encourages and supports confidentiality. Despite these positive areas in self-administered polling, there are some drawbacks. The number one issue is response rate. The response rate for self-administered polls received through the mail is quite low which drastically affects the poll and can even prevent the poll from being publicly announced. In an attempt to receive a higher response rate with this poll, I am designing the poll to be administered to more people than is needed for a representative sample. By doing this, the chance of receiving enough completed polls of a representative sample increases. Another drawback in a self-administered poll in regards to my poll design is that there may not be an up-to-date list of all of the U.S. population, which is where I want my representative sample to come from. However, I feel that this problem is not as big of an issue as it would be with telephone polling. This is because I think there is more of a chance to reach people today through the mail versus through a landline since so many people today rely solely on cellular phones. I am not saying that telephone polling does not work, when in fact it does. It is just that since the results of my poll are not rushed seeing as though the issue of embryonic stem cell research is not salient at the moment, a mailed self-administered poll may work better.