Let's discuss the meaning of specific polling reports using the margin of error
Your main post:
Visit one of the polling sites listed and choose one poll to analyze
- Go to one of these sites: Quinnipiac PollLinks to an external site., Marist PollLinks to an external site., 538Links to an external site. (political polling), Washington Post Poll,Links to an external site. Fox News PollLinks to an external site.. (Note: the first two, Quinnipiac and Marist, are academically based well respected polling centers. The last two are journalistic and are known to have a particular point of view (bias)Links to an external site., the Washington Post leans 'left' and Fox New is decidedly 'right', politically speaking.
- Spend a little time clicking on the different topics and polls - those that you find interesting - look at the dates, questions, answers and answer patterns (%s) and other information (N, Margin of error!)...
- After you have looked at many questions, choose one poll and one question (& its answers) to use for this discussion.
- Ensure that it is a poll that is recent - not old!
- You'll need the percent for one of the responses to the question and the N. Look for the N in the 'fine print' - if you chose a legitimate poll, it should have the N and their margin of error calculation available near the poll findings.
Then, for the question you chose, post the following - using the question topic as your post subject
- the link to the web page where you got the data so we can go look at it
- your own calculation of the margin of error (for one of the answer categories) and whether or not your margin of error matches the one they stated, and
- a brief interpretation of the results - use the sentence structure we use in our class work.
Your comment posts:
Post at least two comments on someone else's data - interpret what they calculated. Discuss what it means for society and people. Discuss any potential problems with the data collection or sample.
Have fun with this - don't over-think the interpretation... Use the format in our worksheet...
You will need to choose ONLY ONE of the answers for a question to do the Margin of Error calculation.
ExampleNote: If you want to know how to use the Math Formula icon to put in the Standard Error formula: click here. You do not need to get fancy - you can always just type things out in words, describing what you are doing.
If you want to post the poll webpage as a hyperlink, as I did in the example, copy the URL of the page you want to use, go into Canvas and in the discussion text box, highlight the text you want to link (usually that's the name of the topic). Click on the Links button (chain icon) in the text box ribbon (above where you type) and click for 'external link' - paste in the URL you copied.
If you want to post an image from the website, you can right-click to see if you can grab the URL or save the image. If you find the URL for just the image, link it as an 'external link'. You can also do a screenshot. If you get the file, upload it as an image (the icon with the picture of a mountain and sun). Be sure to add alt-text to describe the image!