University of Iowa students are training to take part in a state poll.
By Anis Shakirah Mohd Muslimin
Students will soon join CNN and Quinnipiac to have a role in defining the presidential campaign.
Faculty and students from the University of Iowa Political Science Department will conduct a poll for the state of Iowa next week from Oct. 19 till Oct. 25.
The department has been conducting the Hawkeye Poll since 2007 as an effort to garner public opinion on political and social issues in the state.
“The polls will deal with political topics; I won’t even say broadly speaking, but it’s mostly about the caucus, candidates, public policies, and so on,” said Professor Frederick Boehmke, the faculty adviser for the Hawkeye Poll.
Data from the poll will be used to draft press releases for the media and to provide information needed as the basis for academic papers, said Abigail Rury, a teaching and research assistant who teaches the Hawkeye Poll course this fall.
“The poll has also helped expose UI undergraduates to the process of survey research,” she said.
Students involved with the polling have been participating in 90-minute training sessions Oct. 5 to prepare them for the actual survey next week.
“Part of the training is to learn how to conduct a poll, which involves getting familiar with the real life poll calling center at the Iowa Social Science Research Center,” Rury said.
Additionally, she said students would learn how to operate the computer program for the questions and also read through surveys for the first time.
“Opinion polls are very valuable as a practical experience for students, but they also give us [students] a feedback on what people in Iowa are thinking,” said Dexter Golinghorst, a political science major at the UI.
He said public opinion is important to determine Iowan’s attitudes on different policy issues.
Rury said students are involved in numerous ways including developing poll questions, conducting calls, analyzing results, and helping draft press releases for the media.
Boehmke said no changes have been made to the polling methods despite the increasing perceived unreliability of political polls. Gallup has decided to sit out the presidential primary race after wonky numbers in 2012.
Instead, the faculty has adapted to the changes of the time by incorporating cell phones and oversampling young potential voters, he said.
“We try to stay up to date on the academic literature and best practices reported at conferences, as well as keep updated with research in political science and in polling particularly,” Boehmke said.
He said biases could be avoided by getting an accurate representative sample of the population and by making sure the surveys are done in a neutral way.
“Any given poll can be wrong, but if you look at the broad history of polling research, even in recent elections, it’s done a pretty good job,” Boehmke said.
