It’s a well-established pattern during this Parliament that YouGov generally gives lower ratings to the Liberal Democrats than other pollsters, and this appears to be due to YouGov finding female voters to be more Conservative than other polling companies. Whilst YouGov did well in last year’s London Mayor elections, its record in other elections is more mixed. Most notably, its exist poll at the last European elections got the Conservative and UKIP vote shares badly wrong.
Interesting then to see Ben Goldacre’s column in yesterday’s Guardian which, on the way to rubbishing the PR of an insurance company, took to task a YouGov poll about transport:
LV paid YouGov to sample 2,193 adults in November 2008, using an online questionnaire. It starts by announcing that 43% of adults cycle, which sounds rather high to me. The General Household Survey is produced by the Office of National Statistics. It doggedly interviews all the adults in a random sample of 13,000 addresses, face to face, asking them a huge number of questions in great detail. The latest GHS reckons that 19% have cycled once in the past year, and 9% in the past four weeks. So YouGov and LV Insurance with their online questionnaire are disagreeing by a factor of four already.
“Of these,” LV goes on, “11% have been involved in an accident, 7% of these took place in the last six months = 150,434 accidents.” We will move to the published accident figures from the Department for Transport (whose website has contained not a single use of the word “snow” this week, rather brilliantly).
There were, according to the most recent figures from DfT, 16,230 accidents in the year from October 2007 to September 2008, so YouGov’s online questionnaire disagrees this time by a factor of 10. You might speculate that DfT data is prone to under-reporting, and I would agree, but I trust this imperfect data more than I trust the opinion of a PR person who misses barn-door seasonal variation and seriously reckons half of you cycle. Also, most of those accidents reported to the DfT were minor.
God I’m boring.
You can read the full piece here.
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5 Comments
I’ve always wondered about You Gov.
First because they are a self-selected group; the only polling pool that is based on membership, not on an objective sample.
Many of the country’s total voting pool are ruled out because they are not motivated to be members of You Gov, or are not on-line.
If the latter seems unlikely nowadays I look around my elderly friends and find that most are not; and those that are use it for practical things like shopping.
I belong to the voting elderly group but unusually have been a member of You Gov since it began several years ago. In that time I have only once been asked about political affiliation or voting intention, and that was during a period when I had changed my profile in relation to my newspaper readership. The Sun rather than the Indie. Not really a lie because I read them all on line for their political content.
However, I am always invited to complete the You Gov Brand Index surveys. ( This is a complete waste because as a pensioner I do not have the means to toy with Brands.)
Perhaps You-Gov will explain its selection methods. It would be helpful to know how many registered members they have and how they select their polling samples; they seem to do about 2 polls per month; is their membership large enough to get different representative samples each time, or are they using the same sample each time?
For the Manchester Congestion Charge, Ipsos Mori were employed to poll 5,000 people across all 10 Greater Manchester boroughs. A professional polling organisation, proper sampling and a huge sample size (compared to, say, standard opinion polls).
And yet they got it wrong. Not just a little wrong but hopelessly off. Ipsos Mori reported back that around 53% of people favoured the congestion charge with 47% against. The actual result was 80% against, 20% for.
It might have been a late swing (polling Aug-Oct, actual vote in December) but I don’t think so. For one thing, the Lib Dem summer survey we did in August and September (without proper sampling but with a high return rate) predicted the result to within 2%.
With opinion polls on voting, the issues are well understood. With other polls, there seems to be a lot more scope for getting the answer you want to get.
I bet getting Ipsos Mori to poll 5,000 people wasn’t cheap either: perhaps there should have been a “money back if we get it wrong by more than 20%” clause in the contract.
All polls should be taken with a pinch of salt – polls from organisations run by a former Tory Parliamentary candidate doubly so. (Stephan Shakespeare – Colchester ’97. Or was it ’92? My memory’s going!)
I was at boarding school with Stephan Shakespeare – only then he was Stephan Kukowski. Perhaps YouGov’s problem is personation?
I recommend the latest You Gove survey if you are over 35 – it asks your age and then credits you with 50p! Presumably aimed at twenty somethings, but its the quickest I’ve ever done one!