On ABC1’s Insiders today, host Barrie Cassidy put to the Australian’s George Megalogenis a “theory” a Labor MP (was it a minister?) had put to Barrie about last fortnight’s now famous 52 to 48 Newspoll: that the pollster had asked asylum seekers questions before the voting intention (and approval etc) ones, and this had polluted the latter.
The main problem with this theory is that (as far as we know) there were no asylum seeker questions asked by Newspoll that weekend; it was routine political questions only. Asylum seekers were asked next weekend (minus – also now famously – published voting intentions).
But more generally, as George explained, Newspoll just wouldn’t do that. This applies to all the serious, major pollsters: voting intention questions come first, always, followed by approval/satisfaction and preferred/better PM, followed by specific issues if applicable. Any who did muck this up would soon (rightly) hang from polling community’s nearest lamp-post.
[Update: Newspoll boss Martin O'Shannessy clears things up.]
[Upupdate: a reader writes: “I was one of the people polled in the Newspoll where the voting intention results weren’t released.
The questions asked were:
Voting intention
Asylum Seekers
Sky Sport radio (had I ever listened)
Attitudes to suicide and prevention programs
House paint. If you had bought it recently (as I had), where from, who was the primary decision maker etc. As I said to Possum (I emailed him as soon as the pollster hung up), I couldn’t wait to see the cross tabs on voting and paint.”
(There is another issue, when political questions are tacked onto the end of a pollster’s other polls – about margarine, Home and Away, cars or whatever. As far as I know none of the main pollsters does that, although they may from time to time do it the other way, ie ask the margarine questions after the political one. This would only pollute the margarine research, to a presumably small degree. But I don’t know the full story here, and anyway I digress.)
Peter,
I’ve been polled twice F t F by Morgan.
My memory (always a bit dodgy)is that the political questions did actually come in between Qs about soap powders etc, or at least at the end of those questions.
I am almost certain that on at least one of those occasions the political questions definitely did not come first.
Thanks Barney, interesting. Morgan of course does not have a client commissioning their political polls these days.
Newspoll usually ran their political questions over the weekend in an omnibus (collection of short phone surveys.) The order of questions would be:
* Demographics (age, gender etc)
* Voting Intention (state/federal in alternating weeks)
* Other political questions if any (e.g. budget, asylum seekers)
* Everything else (soap powder etc)
Question ordering and was always a concern and political questions would always be first.
George Megalogenis and Moose are right, we always ask voting intention first followed by leader’s ratings and then any other questions pertinent to the poll. This has been the order, unbroken since 1985. We never precede our poll questions with others except for those demographics required to qualify. Martin O’Shannessy CEO Newspoll.