4 Working With Statistics

rw-book-cover

Metadata

There’s no perfect way to do a poll. They’ll all have some amount of error baked in, depending on factors like how many people were polled, the framing of the questions, or how well the people polled match to the general population in terms of demographics. A candidate who appears to be 1 point ahead might actually be 3 points behind, allowing for margin of error. You can know the error range—each poll has one. But you can’t know exactly what the answer is within that margin. It’s important to communicate poll results in a way that won’t make the polls seem more certain than they truly are. (View Highlight)