Why doesn the Times Poll conduct online or call-in polls?
Answer Online polls are surveys that computer users can participate in by answering questions over an Internet connection or some other online service. Call-in polls are surveys in which people are invited to call a phone number (which may or may not be toll-free) to register their views. The Times Poll does not conduct polls of these kinds because their results are unreliable as a measure of public opinion. They have several methodological problems. Our polls (like all scientifically sound public opinion surveys) are conducted by first selecting a random sample of people to interview — usually based on their telephone numbers — and then calling each of them and persuading them to talk to us about the subject that we are interested in. We carefully monitor the results to be sure that our sample is representative of the race, educational attainment, regional distribution, etc., of the population we are sampling. The results of such a survey can be relied upon to approximate the views
