Practice question · Multiple choice
The Literary Digest received about 2.4 million returned ballots in 1936 and predicted the wrong winner, while Gallup was right with roughly fifty thousand cases. Why did the far larger sample perform worse?
Hints
- Ask who owned a telephone or a car in the United States in 1936.
- Size reduces sampling error; it does nothing at all to selection bias.
Show the answer
A. Phone and car lists plus voluntary returns made the sample unlike the electorate
Why
Two distortions compounded: the frame excluded poorer households in the middle of the Depression, and returning a mailed ballot was itself voluntary, which selected the motivated. Neither error shrinks as the sample grows, so the extra millions bought precision about a population that was not the electorate.
Practise Analysing Social Processes
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