How are polling companies trying to increase accuracy when gauging your political opinion?

VANCOUVER (NEWS 1130) – There are still more than two months until we head to the ballot boxes for the federal election but that hasn’t stopped pollsters from trying to predict the outcome.

As society shifts away from traditional polling methods, it is getting more difficult to get an accurate read on our political appetite.

“The entire industry has been struggling with the difficulty of finding a random sample. It used to be remarkably simple in the 1980s. A lot of people had landlines and everybody answered the phone,” says Mario Canseco with market research firm Insights West.

“If the actual sample that you’re using doesn’t look like the census, then it doesn’t make any sense if you spoke to 70,000 people if all of them are men or in Toronto.”

And after getting it completely wrong in the last provincial election, Canseco says pollsters are shifting their data collection efforts online.

“It’s really draining to talk about your age, your gender, your household income — it really leads to much longer surveys. And it’s one of the reasons why people don’t want to take telephone surveys anymore; it really takes a long time. So doing it online saves you that time because you already know who you’re talking to,” says Canseco.

So they’re doing just that, hoping to avoid a situation like the last provincial election when the BC Liberals came out on top, despite getting crushed in the polls.

“It’s definitely happening more often now,” Canseco admits.

“Every time there’s an election, there are more people using online tools — either for the entirety of their data collection or for part of it, combining it with the phone. A lot people said that this wasn’t going to work but it’s really proven to be one of the best ways to collect data.”