Web Survey Bibliography
In 1936, George Gallup correctly forecast Franklin Roosevelt’s presidential landslide at a time when one of the country’s well-known straw polls was predicting a comfortable win for Republican Alf Landon. Gallup was one of the first to adopt a statistical development probability sampling—that soon became the gold standard of American public opinion research. In robability sampling, each member of the sample is selected with known probability (simple random sampling, in which each member of the sample has an equal probability of selection, is the simplest example). According to tatistical theory, a probability sample will be representative of the larger population to a calculable degree and thus free of the selection biases that plagued straw polls. In short order, American public opinion researchers adopted probability sampling as the means to the end of representative samples.
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