ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of the book. The book is intended for people who are in some way confronted with polls. It may be due to the fact that they have to judge the outcomes of polls as a part of their professional work. One can think of journalists, decision makers, political scientists, and politicians. The book helps them to establish whether a poll is good or bad, and whether they safely can use the poll results, or whether it is better to ignore the poll. It provides useful source of information for those who want to carry out a poll themselves and are not an expert in this area. Polls and surveys are instruments for collecting data about a specific target population. To be able to generalize the results of the analysis to the sample data to the target population, the sample must be selected properly.
