Author Archives: Oleh Iwanyshyn

About Oleh Iwanyshyn

Oleh Iwanyshyn has been involved professionally with surveys from the mid-70s when he started as a methodologist at the Institute for Behavioral Research at York University. Later, while at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation his focus shifted to media and election surveys. He now runs his own survey research company, ViewStats Research, established in 1997 and specializing in online surveys. Public opinion surveys is an essential communication tool between a democratic society and its leaders. Unfortunately, surveys can be very easily manipulated. Revealing such manipulations and their consequences is the raison d'être of the poll stuff blog.

What Did Polls Really Tell Us about Public Opinion on the Obama Health Care Bill?

Polls on the Obama health care reforms bill raised troubling questions about the validity of their results. In particular, how did the American public answer polling questions about this complex piece of legislation when, by their own admission, most said … Continue reading

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How Polls Divided Americans on Obama’s Health Care Reforms

In theory, polls on the Obama health care reforms were supposed to measure public attitudes. In fact, they helped create them. How did this happen? What were these polling fictions? How did the tail end up wagging the dog? The … Continue reading

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Polls, Privacy and Security: a Betrayal of Public Trust

How were millions of Americans recently persuaded to accept outrageously invasive body searches at airports while voicing the most muted of protests? I mean we’re talking about the land of the free, the home of John Wayne, where citizens covet … Continue reading

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Polls and Pat Downs: Questionable Results and Misguided Narratives

An ABC news/Washington Post poll recently reported that two of every three Americans (64%) supported the use of full body x-ray scanners. The same poll also found that half of all Americans (50%) said that “enhanced” pat downs were justified … Continue reading

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Trusting Polls: Confidence Intervals and Survey Bias

The illusion of scientific validity Let’s face it. Public opinion polls are pretentious. They boast that their results are obtained through “scientific” surveys. The implication of course is that a scientific survey delivers accurate results. In fact, they claim the … Continue reading

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Partisan polling: Is the GOP buying favorable results?

Nate Silver on his blog FiveThirtyEight examined the avalanche of polls conducted for the 2010 US midterm election and came to the somewhat shocking conclusion that certain pollsters produced biased results that favored the GOP. Specifically, he fingered the Rasmussen … Continue reading

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Reid vs Angle: A fabricated polling event

After beating Republican challenger Sharron Angle by 5% (50% to 45%) in Nevada, the winner and still Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid complained that the polls leading up to the election were “false and misleading”. He may be right. In … Continue reading

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