Interpreting Survey Results: Republican Party

Posted: August 27th, 2021

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Interpreting Survey Results: Republican Party

The survey is on the Republican Party, which was conducted online by the CBS News Poll from 15^th to 18^thNovember 2018. The URL for the survey is: https://www.pollingreport.com/rep.htm

The Poll Question

The poll question is seeking to know how favorable is the Republican Party according to public opinion. The question is stated as follows:

“In general, is your opinion of the Republican Party favorable or not favorable.” (CBS News Poll).

Thus, the responses included general opinions about whether the respondent views the party as favorable, not favorable, or unsure if they have no opinion about the survey question. According to the survey, the sample size (N) included 1,103 adults nationwide with a margin error of about ±3%.

Interpretation of the Results

The survey focused on a population of 1,103 respondents. The results show that about 40% of the respondents believe that the party is favorable, while 54% believe it is not favorable. From the target population, 6% were unsure of their opinion about the party. Thus, the survey attained about 94% responses.

Confidence Interval

A confidence interval refers to a range of values where the actual values of a statistic lie. This study demonstrates that about 441±3%, that is, (40%*1103= 441), agree that the Republican Party is favorable. Hence, using the Error margin with a confidence interval of 95%, the following is the confidence interval for the study (Unit 6 LiveBinder; Confidence Interval with Success Known).

Table 1: Calculated Confidence Interval

The confidence interval is 441±1.96*0.3 (margin of error) = 441 ±0.0588. However, from Table 1, this is estimated as 441±0.371. Thus, the margin of error estimate of the confidence interval is lower than the calculated confidence interval.

Potential Biases that Could Skew Sampling Results

It is smart to embrace data drive decisions. However, it becomes costly when biases are involved since this renders a wrong depiction of the data—some of these biases are likely to skew sampling results. The first one is the confirmation bias that occurs because of an unintentional or intentional desire to prove a particular opinion, hypothesis, or assumption. This bias is the most common of the cognitive biases, hence often realized in most studies.

            Another potential bias is the selection bias associated with the subjective selection of data or by using non-random data. In this case, the selected population fails to represent the actual population, thus skewing the results. This type of bias is expected in this survey since it involves selecting a particular research question to obtain specific opinions. Equally, the surveys were distributed to a specific target population. Therefore, even though the respondents are a representative sample, the selection bias influences the results’ reliability. As such, most businesses often access a small part of the population, which often implies the collected information and final results are skewed.