Polling Research

It's come time for me to do a little more research on surveys and polls, which I will be using for my paper. Dr. Burton suggested micropoll: http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/easily-make-a-online-poll-sidebar-micropoll/

I've also looked at:

http://www.misterpoll.com/

http://polldaddy.com/

http://www.surveymonkey.com/

I've also researched different polling websites to find cautions or concerns with polling, to determine the best ways to conduct a poll, to get the most useful answers, and use those answers in an ethical way.

The Pew Research Center for The People and the Press (http://people-press.org/methodology/faq/)has some useful links about collecting survey data and Questionnaire design, and I've been browsing their website.

The National Council on Public Polls (http://www.ncpp.org/?q=node/4) also has some good questions to ask of polls to determine their legitimacy, and I'm including a few of those questions below:

1. Who did the poll?
2. Who paid for the poll and why was it done?
3. How many people were interviewed for the survey?
4. How were those people chosen?
5. What area (nation, state, or region) or what group (teachers,lawyers, Democratic voters, etc.) were these people chosen from?
6. Are the results based on the answers of all the people interviewed?
7. Who should have been interviewed and was not? Or do response rates matter?
8. When was the poll done?
9. How were the interviews conducted?
10. What about polls on the Internet or World Wide Web?
11. What is the sampling error for the poll results?
12. Who’s on first?
13. What other kinds of factors can skew poll results?
14. What questions were asked?
15. In what order were the questions asked?
16. What about "push polls?"
17. What other polls have been done on this topic? Do they say the same thing? If they are different, why are they different?
18. What about exit polls?
19. What else needs to be included in the report of the poll?
20. So I've asked all the questions. The answers sound good. Should we report the results

So, here are a few questions:

1. What do you think are the limitations of polls and surveys?

2. Do you have any suggestions for survey sites or books that I should look into, either that perform polling functions or that analyze and critique the process? So far I haven't found any specifically dealing with polling in academia.

3. Do you have a favorite polling website, or certain kind of poll/survey that you like?

Quick thoughts on my 2nd paper

I've already got a paper that I'm working on revising; it's 13 pages long, so it's quite a bit to bite off for anyone giving me comments. What I'd like to look at, in part, is the way that I make assertions in the paper as a stand-in for the reader, when in fact the reader might not agree with the assertions I am making. I intend to take lines and phrases from the paper so that my peers can give me feedback on whether those assertions hold up, or whether they are really only the opinions of the writer (me). So, the "new media" component would be the method of polling my peers and integrating feedback into the paper.

Also, because the paper is about a film - itself a comparatively "new medium," I think the arguments in the paper already address new media concepts, and I will continue to develop those.