EXAMPLE 3 Are Online Polls in Line?

The American Family Association (AFA) is a conservative group that claims to stand for “traditional family values.” it has often posted online poll questions on its website; just click on a response to take part. Because the respondents are people who visit this site, the poll results always support AFA’s positions. Well, almost always; a recent AFA online poll asked about allowing same-sex marriage, and before long, email lists and social-network sites favored mostly by young liberals pointed to the AFA poll. Almost 850,000 people responded, and 60% of them favored the legalization of same-sex marriage. This example shows that the results of an online poll can be skewed one way or the other by particular characteristics of the people who choose to go to that website and participate in the poll.

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A related example is the website www.ratemyprofessors.com, where students have chosen to evaluate and post comments on more than 1 million college and university instructors worldwide. However, focus group research indicates the ratings may not be representative because the students most motivated to post assessments are those who believe the teacher is either extremely bad or extremely good. A different kind of problem is that this website may have no way of keeping out multiple responses from the same student—or even from the instructors themselves! it is usually better to rely on the official end-of-course evaluation data compiled by the university.