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Over the past fifty years, public opinion polls have assumed an increasingly important role in daily life. Quite possibly every person living in America has at one time or another been affected by polls. In fact, few aspects of our lives remain untouched by polls—from the television programs we watch, to the choice of candidates for public office, to national political issues, to the products we buy. Polling has become widely known through frequent use by television and the mass market print media.

This chapter discusses the development of public opinion polls in Malaysia, especially those related to politics and elections in the state. It traces the early attempts at public opinion polls and their relatively recent development in estimating electoral outcomes in Malaysia. In analysing the efforts, the chapter relates the conduct of opinion polls with changing trends in Malaysia’s elections, particularly the shift from a dominant party system to one of two-coalition systems since the 12th general elections (GE12) in 2008. The chapter also discusses the role of the various actors who are involved in opinion polling, and the usual contents in such polls. It evaluates the possibility and difficulty of the polls in estimating outcomes of elections. In view of the new norms developing since the spread of COVID-19 in 2020, the chapter also explores the challenges and opportunities of public opinion polls in articulating public sentiment.

The purpose of this paper is to design and describe a model of instruction for librarians to effectively teach evaluation skills for public opinion polls.

The paper show a coherent framework for instruction was identified through a survey of the literature. Learning objectives or essential core questions were identified by looking at codes and standards from five major organizations: National Council on Public Polls, Council of American Survey Research Organizations, World Association of Opinion and Marketing Research, American Association for Public Opinion Research, and the European Society of Marketing and Research. The objectives were incorporated into the aforementioned structure.

The paper finds from nine documents produced by these organizations 15 elements were identified and grouped into nine essential questions: purpose of the poll, sponsor of the poll, polling organization, questions asked, order of the questions, who was polled, how were the interviews conducted, date of the poll, statistics offered to substantiate accuracy. A consistent framework was identified from an earlier work by Dodd.

The paper shows it is virtually impossible to provide a comprehensive list of all the possible ways that opinion polls can be misrepresentative. These are only a list of essential elements and questions necessary for an evaluation of polls.

The public opinion poll continues to have a prominent role as a source of information in the societies of the world. As such, it is important that librarians as well as users are conversant in how to evaluate and place into context this type of information.

This paper continues a dialogue within the profession about the impact of numbers as an information source. Librarians must become more conversant with numbers and, along with users, savvy consumers.

As we approach the millennium, we find ourselves in a world that places ever greater weight and significance on the outcome of polls, surveys, and market research. The advent of modern polling began with the use of scientific sampling in the mid‐1930s and has progressed vastly beyond the initial techniques and purposes of the early practitioners such as George Gallup, Elmo Roper, and Archibald Crossley. In today's environment, the computer is an integral part of most commercial survey work, as are the efforts by academic and nonprofit enterprises. It should be noted that the distinction between the use of the words “poll” and “survey” is somewhat arbitrary, with the mass media seeming to prefer “polling,” and with academia selecting “survey research.” However, searching online systems will yield differing results, hence this author's inclusion of both terms in the title of this article.

One of the fundamental tenets of social studies education is preparing students to become knowledgeable and informed citizens. Especially in this era of increased communication and technology, one skill necessary for informed citizenship is the ability to critically understand polling data. Social studies educators, however, rarely provide their students with the mathematical framework required to move beyond face-value analysis of public opinion polls. This article outlines the basic statistical processes behind public opinion polls and provides social studies teachers with activities that encourage students to critically question political data presented in the media.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how organisations seek to legitimate their decisions by tracking the relationship between press releases issued by the Australian Government to support their involvement in the Iraq war, media framing of news stories about this issue, and public opinion.

The study uses a qualitative content analysis of government press releases and media coverage, and the results of Newspoll opinion polls.

The study showed that despite shifts in the framing of the stories, public opinion remained almost constant.

Given these results, the authors suggest that media content does not necessarily change public opinion on a particular issue.

Using media coverage as a reflection of either the organisation's legitimating attempts, or of public opinion may provide an inaccurate account of the legitimacy of an organisation's decisions.

This study provides evidence that media content does not reflect the legitimacy of an organisational decision nor has a direct influence on public opinion.

In US political reporting, the top story has become the public opinion polls that purport to state the voters’ evaluations of potential candidates, current office holders or the impact of current events. Many politicians, in turn, often develop their campaign positions in response to the polls. This discussion aims to address how year after year, despite increasing spending by news organizations to predict election results, the polls are repeatedly unable to predict election outcomes. Excuses are made, while the misuse and misunderstanding of marketing research spreads to other types of public organizations.

Points out the contradictions between public opinion polling predictions of election results and actual events, with explanations of the usually unstated qualitative limitations to survey data.

Qualitative research bias could have a greater impact on outcomes than statistical margins of error, although it is only the latter that is reported or discussed by the news media.

This abuse and misuse of marketing research lowers the credibility of all marketing research, and the people in marketing research, should speak out. The pollsters want to keep their methods as having a mystical value as they sell their research information to the public and other data users. At worst, this is a misleading selling of marketing insight to the public and research experts should start to speak out, encouraging journalists to report more properly the reality of public opinion polls.

The popular metaphor of public opinion polls has been to call them a “snapshot” of public views. This offers a more realistic metaphor of survey data, an impressionistic painting that is influenced by numerous researchers or respondent biases that cannot be controlled.

Security and defense policy is not a topic that traditionally attracts as much public attention as does domestic policy. Also, public opinion can be influenced by singular events such as terrorist attacks or acute humanitarian catastrophes, which create flash-like peaks in the public attention. However, it is well known that the more persistent patterns of public opinion are rather formed by long-term traits and globally affecting developments. The international mission in Afghanistan following the collapse of the Taliban regime seems to have the potential to be such a global event.

This chapter deals with the development of public opinion in Germany on security and defense issues in the last few years. It strives to investigate long-lasting patterns of security-related public opinion that can be found among the German citizenry. In order to do so, it takes an overview on some selected security and defense issues. In detail, the paper investigates the general attitude toward the armed forces, which have undergone considerable change in recent years, the public approach toward the system of military mobilization and the feeling toward the participation of Germany in international missions. It thereby gives special consideration to the current ISAF mission in Afghanistan, as this mission has created a major political debate among participating NATO-partner countries. The paper describes how the controversy about the German troop contribution within the alliance is echoed in public opinion polls. Furthermore, it tries to explain these patterns in light of the specific historical background and by using the collective self-concept that materializes in Europe and Germany in recent years.

In seeking to extend rational choice theory from “market” to “political” behaviour, economists have encountered a paradox: namely, that the act of voting itself appears to be inconsistent with the assumption of rationality. This is true not only when self‐interest is assumed, but also when altruistic behaviour (at least in its non‐Kantian form) is allowed for. This article surveys the theoretical and empirical literature on the determinants of the decision to participate in voting, and concludes that this decision is responsive to changes in the expected benefits and costs of voting; even though the expected costs of voting must normally outweigh the expected benefits. Interpretations of this behaviour include the possibility that voters act rationally, but are misinformed about the likely effectiveness of their votes; alternatively, the electorate may include more Kantians than economists have generally been willing to admit.

One of the factors that make the divination of public opinion compelling is the decline of party systems and the rise of “individuated politics” (Dalton, 2002a, 2002b, 2006). If individuals are now the major actors in politics and have volatile opinions, then finding out what opinions sectors of the public have, and attempting to shape them, becomes crucial. This circumstance makes the inspection and analysis of mass opinion compelling and significant (see Ginsberg, 1986; Ginsberg & Shefter, 1990; Herbst, 1993). It also makes “public opinion” a compelling abstraction and political force. Finding it and divining its meaning has spawned its own organizational structures and constituencies.