Alternative to Polling

My final paper in my public opinion class is to discuss an alternative means of finding public opinion. The author of the book we are focusing on for this unit, James Fishkin, makes the argument that people's responses to polling questions are different when they all meet and discuss the issue. This allows all respondents to be informed and make decisions based on that knowledge. While this would not allow a scientific sample, it is interesting and affirms that respondents will answer polling questions when they don't know about an issue. Fishkin also argues that public opinion should not be all that important to politics when the results of the polls are based on answers by uninformed people. He discusses something called deliberative polling, which allows respondents to discuss the issue and then answer questions regarding their opinions.
My paper will center on this method. My idea is to recruit respondents who can gain internet access and allow them to discuss the issue in an online discussion or chat room. This allows respondents the opportunity to voice their opinions in privacy. I know that everyone does not have Internet access, however; my idea is to recruit respondents through the mail and allow them time to find access to a computer with Internet. For example, people may have friends who have the Internet, the library has the Internet, and some people have Internet at work. If respondents can gain this access, the issue of not having the Internet decreases. With the Internet being available worldwide, this allows a substantially large amount of people to participate. Many people are on the Internet or their computers throughout the day which can encourage participation. In order to access the chat room or discussion, there would be questions they have to answer first in order to see where they stand on the issue prior to discussing it. At the end, they would re-answer the questions to show how much public opinion changed due to their deliberations. This is just the beginning of my brainstorming and I will post more as I write this paper.

Focus Group

Yesterday I conducted a focus group about stem cell research, more specifically embryonic stem cell research. The purpose was to discover the opinions of the participants. All participants were volunteers and said they all had an opinion on the issue. There were a total of 7 participants from my community. I asked them all first with a show of hands who was for or against this research. I was happy to see that the group was pretty split with 4 being in favor and 3 being opposed. All those in favor maintained their position when the focus group was finished with their discussion while 1 person who was opposed actually changed his mind because he stated that he thought he knew what embryonic stem cell research was but through the focus group, realized it was something completely different and changed his position to favoring the research. The other 2 who were opposed were still in opposition whenthe group finished. While I will be writing a 15-20 page paper on the focus group's discussion, I will let viewers know some things that were said although not everything will be revealed here. First, I was quite pleased that everyone participated and was respectful. They all were interested in learning exactly what the research is regardless of whether or not they changed their minds at the end. All 7 had some idea as to what the research is and what it is used for. Even if part of their answer was incorrect, they still had some correct idea. For example, 2 people knew stem cells were extracted from fertilized eggs, however, they both believed that the cells were extracted from an egg that was already fertilized inside a woman. When asked the question as to what the difference was between embryonic stem cells and human stem cells, one person believed that human stem cells are used to find cures for people who have diseases while embryonic stem cells could only be used for pre-birth deformities that have been discovered during pregnancy. It was interesting to watch people who knew more about the issue to correct those who were misinformed. For instance, one woman said that you cannot help an embryo because if it had deformities, it would abort itself (miscarriage). All in all, the 2 who were in opposition really opposed embryonic stem cell research, but approved of human stem cell research.