Missing Voices

Perspectives: Research and Creative Activities at SIUC, Spring 2008

:: research survey ::

Missing Voices

When an opinion poll and the actual results of a political primary vote don't coincide, SIUC sociology professor Darren Sherkat isn't surprised.

Sherkat's scholarship combines his interest in religion with his interest in quantitative methods and statistics. A recent article of his in the journal Sociology of Religion offers an explanation of why opinion polls don't accurately predict actual voting results.

"Religion and Survey Non-Response Bias: Toward Explaining the Moral Voter Gap Between Surveys and Voting" asserts that many popular opinion polls and surveys don't use scientific methods to ensure that their polls are representative of a given population. In addition, the constant demand for immediate, up-to-the-second information encourages the propagation of wrong information.

"We have lost our attention to high-quality data," Sherkat says.

One of the most slippery problems in obtaining accurate survey answers is accounting for biases created when particular groups of people refuse to participate in the study.

Sherkat's research indicates that religious affiliation and fundamentalist beliefs often play a role in political survey response—and non-response. In other words, religious factors not only affect an individual's political opinions, but also may affect that person's willingness to respond to a given political opinion survey.

In particular, Sherkat says, his study and others recently conducted by researchers at the Pew Research Center have found that political conservatives with a strong conservative religious orientation are more likely to refuse participation in political opinion surveys.

"A political opinion survey presented by a university, for example, can be seen by some religious conservatives as a liberal-biased survey because they perceive the university system as liberal-biased," he says. "As a result, they may not respond to the survey."

In turn, Sherkat notes, conservative boycotts of perceived liberal bias can cause those surveys actually to reflect a liberal bias, regardless of the survey-takers' intent. The result, as his research indicates, is that political conservatives in particular are often underrepresented in political opinion surveys.

"They feel embattled," he says. "Their response rates are far too low for accurate data in political opinion surveys....Political opinion surveys aren't a random sample of the population—they are at best a random sample of the population who cooperates with the survey."

—by Andrea Hahn