Who even likes Donald Trump?

Its kind of a controversial issue,

because he is in the running for the next president of the United States.
According to one of the polls that I looked at, Trump is only 37 percent
favorable. Polls are often used to try and predict the outcomes of the next
election. This is because a poll is a way to see what a majority of the general
public likes or prefers. Meaning that polls are inductive generalizations.
Inductive generalizations take a sample from a population and the sample is
used as the populations opinion or preference. But some polls are often
biased in their results due to their methodology in selecting their sample.

The first poll that I looked at and interpreted, was about Donald Trump.
The property of the question, what the poll was asking, was do you have a
favorable or unfavorable impression of Donald Trump. This sample size of
this poll was 630 participants. This sample size of 630, is not large enough
to avoid hastiness. I believe that the minimum number of participants to
avoid a hasty generalization would have to be at least 1000 participants. In
the book Critical Thinking, written by Brooke Moore and Richard Parker, the
author states that a reputable public opinion survey [] usually involves
between 1,000 and 1,500 [participants] in the sample (354, Moore). This
sample was taken from a random sample of registered voters in the United
States. The methodology in selecting the participants in this poll was
through sorting through adults who were over the age of 18 with a telephone
and were registered to vote. They were chosen by a corporation that
specializes in creating random samples for surveys. This corporation is called
Survey Sampling Inc. of Shelton, Conn. They start by having a sample of
landline households in certain states. Then they start a process of RDD,
which is random digit dialing. Whether or not the number are registered to a
person or not, they are called leaving everyone with an equal chance to be
called. But the process is more difficult than that due to the numbers being
separated into states and counties. Then a sample is created from each
county by using sampling procedures from a random start, such that each
county is assigned a sample size proportional to its share of possible
numbers (Langer). The numbers are then sorted even more by area codes.
All of the numbers are called to make sure that they work and then the
sample is chosen from the numbers that are registered to a person. For the
cellphone portion of the sampling, the sample begins with a list of cell phone
numbers that are registered to a person. They are sorted by the billing
address of the phone number is, as well as who the carrier of the cellphone is
and the area code. It is then divided by areas into a thousand squares. They
number the squares from one to 100 ten times. The sampling process
continues with a random selection of a number between 0 and 99. They

randomly select a number between 0 and 99 ten times, once for each of the
squares.

I do not believe that there were any opportunities for bias to creep into
the sample, because the sampling method was used, there couldnt have
been any bias. It could be possible due to different religion, race, political
views in different area and they happened to randomly choose a similar
characteristic in a different area. The target population of the poll was the
general public, registered voters of the United States. I rate this poll an 8 out
of 10 because I believe that this poll has a good methodology for choosing
participants. But it does not receive a 10 out of 19 because I believe that
this polls property in question could have been improved. It is based on
opinion, so I think that they could have added another aspect in order to
narrow it down to where it is not solely opinion based. It also had a small
sample size, which was bad because there could have been a hasty
generalization about the general public in the United States.

The property in question for the second poll is whether or not Donald
Trump Chips Away at Hillary Clinton's National Lead (Hartig). The sample
size of this poll was 24000 people. This sample size is more than enough to
avoid a hasty generalization. The methodology of this sample was an online
survey. The survey was posted on Survey Monkey, a site where people can
take surveys and they are paid a certain amount of money for each survey
they take. The filtered out those who werent registered voters. The sample
is based on those who initially self-selected for participation rather than a
probability sample (NBC News). The opportunity for bias in this poll is quite
high. Since it is not a random sample of people who took the poll, it can be
biased by people who care for politics over those who dont really pay
attention to politics. The target population for this poll was the general
public, registered voters of the United States.
On a scale of 1 to 10, I give this poll a 7. This is because I believe that
this poll may be biased towards those that care about politics versus those
who arent always up to date with politics. But the sample size was large
enough to not have a hasty generalization of the United States population.
An error margin cannot be calculated because the sample itself may or may
not have covered enough of the population. People from the same area of
the country, same background could be taking the polls, which may or may
not put a bias in the poll results.

Overall, there are different polls that can be biased in different ways,
such as if a poll were self-selected, or if the sample size werent big enough
to represent the general public. The polls that I used for this assignment
were overall good polls because they either had big enough samples, or their
sample was random enough to represent the general public of the United
States.

Works Cited
"ABC News/Washington Post (9/28-9/30 2016)". The Huffington Post. N.p.,
2016. Web. 29 Sep. 2016.
DuVall, Eric. "UPI/Cvoter Poll: Trump Regains Lead over Clinton As September
Ends". UPI. N.p., 2016. Web. 29 Sep. 2016.
Hartig, Hannah, John Lapinski, and Stephanie Psyllos. "Hillary Clinton's Lead
Over Donald Trump Has Narrowed In New Poll". NBC News. N.p., 2016.
Web. 29 Sep. 2016.
LANGER, GARY and LANGER ASSOCIATES. "ABC News' Polling Methodology
And Standards".ABC News. N.p., 2016. Web. 29 Sep. 2016.
Moore, Brooke Noel and Richard Parker. Critical Thinking. New York: McGrawHill, 2012. Print.
"NBC News Surveymonkey Toplines And Methodology 8 22-8 28". Scribd.
N.p., 2016. Web. 29 Sep. 2016.