Australian Politics and Policy - Senior, 2019a

Voter behaviour
The history of public opinion surveys
Prior to the development of survey research, sociologists and political scientists
generally studied behaviour and opinions by interviewing people in small groups.
Although providing detailed information, this often resulted in samples that were
too small and too concentrated in limited geographical areas (such as particular
neighbourhoods or workplaces), making it impossible to make generalisations
about the broader public. Journalists and magazines often conducted informal
straw polls and interviews on the street, but these were more for entertainment than
serious research.
Most of the tools on which modern sampling is built have their origins in the
1940s and 1950s. In the USA, Australia and most other representative democracies,
populations became more urban (and therefore concentrated), household telephones
became more common, mailing lists became more accurate and people
became generally easier to reach.
A significant incentive for the development of better public opinion measures
was the burgeoning US radio industry in the 1920s and 1930s. Broadcasts were
primarily funded by advertisers, who wanted to know the size of audiences when
agreeing to pay for air time. Statistical sampling provided this, with random
samples of hundreds or thousands of people offering relatively accurate estimates
of the general population.
Political surveys followed, providing a way to regularly measure citizens’
privately held opinions. This was done by the news media, obtaining measurements
of shifting opinion that they could report. Political parties, candidates and leaders
also undertook surveys and used the data obtained to guide political decisions.
Early survey research relied on in-person interviews. Home telephones were
not yet ubiquitous and were mostly owned by the wealthy. Mail surveys were
difficult, as there was often an absence of complete and reliable lists of valid postal
addresses. However, face-to-face surveys have many of the same drawbacks as
interviews. Regardless, these early efforts at sampling sometimes provided useful
data and established the foundations for later efforts.
There are several types of surveys, and methodological decisions can influence
the utility of different survey types for different purposes. First, researchers need to
decide how they are going to select their sample. The most common method is optout,
or random, sampling, which sits at the centre of modern survey research. It is
built around the idea that every individual in the population of interest (e.g. citizens
likely to vote in an election) has a known probability of being sampled. Random
sampling helps us to secure a representative sample by providing the means to
obtain what is intended to be an unbiased selection of the larger population.
From address-based, in-home interview sampling to surveys by mail, random digit
dialing after the growth of landlines and mobile phones, and online surveys,
researchers have placed significant effort into collecting representative samples.
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