The Baltimore Sun conducted a poll this week asking readers if they believed Maryland’s new restrictions on guns and magazines, which went into effect on Oct 1, was constitutional, Maryland Reporter.com reports, though we were unable to find a link in their story.
More than 18,000 people reportedly responded to the poll on the Sun’s website, and the newspaper said 94 percent of them thought the new law was unconstitutional.
Also on the same Internet, you can find a sample item from Maryland’s High School Assessment in algebra I and data analysis. The question reads as follows:
Fred wants to determine the mean hourly wage of the working students at his school. He asks thirty of his friends their hourly wage and calculates the sample mean to be $6. Which of these statements must be true?
A. The sample was selected randomly.
B. Bias was present in the selection process.
C. The sample was representative of the population.
D. The mean hourly wage of the working students at Fred’s school was $6.
Obviously, this is a question that was written long before the minimum wage of $7.25 took effect. But besides that, this question, with a correct answer of “(B) Bias was present in the selection process,” can teach readers something about the polling process.
The Sun poll does say “Results not scientific,” which means you’re not really supposed to trust them. Like Fred in the HSA question, the Sun asked only their friends what they thought. This is a pre-qualification for taking the poll that has nothing to do with the poll question, and it introduces bias into the poll.
In other words, the respondents weren’t selected randomly. Only Sun readers could take the poll, and the result can’t be considered representative of Maryland’s residents.
Keep in mind, polls like those asked on news websites as the question of the day or some similar promotion are just for fun. The big questions tend to draw thousands of respondents, but even with a big sample size, the results can’t be reported as representing any group, like Maryland residents.
Even with the bias, though, the poll is interesting: it proves there are at least 17,000 or so Maryland residents who believe the new gun law is unconstitutional. The state has about 5.9 million residents, with a little more than 1 million under 18 and not of voting age.
So, the opinion of 17,000 specially selected readers of one newspaper doesn’t carry the weight of a scientific poll, but the results are still newsworthy. The Sun doesn’t try to represent it as an unbiased poll, as this editorial explains, but readers should keep in mind a lesson about bias from their algebra I classes.