ABSTRACT
Political parties themselves take polls very seriously, and often commission their own private polls to chart their changing fortunes. Polls have their origins in journalism, though they link up with less sensational forms of survey research. The major polls are financed and sponsored by news media. ‘The polls, as creatures of the press, came into being, and continue in being, to provide news stories for newspaper readers’. The General Household Survey sampling design is a probability sample in which identifiable dwellings are selected at the second stage to which interviewers are sent with instructions to interview all persons over 16 in households at that address. The polls differ from continuous surveys in appealing to an entity called ‘public opinion’ which it is their task to measure. A different objection to the pollsters’ definition of public opinion is that polls indeed measure or tap a set of views which are in the air at any one time, a climate of opinion.
