A memorable though possibly apocryphal religious quip dates from the days when Norman Vincent Peale was a famed author and preacher. Democratic presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson supposedly said “I find the Apostle Paul appealing and the Apostle Peale appalling.”
What he found appalling was either Peale’s criticism of Stevenson’s divorce (in 1952), or of candidate Kennedy’s Catholicism (in 1960), or both.
So are polls appealing or appalling?
Eminent sociologist Robert Wuthnow of Princeton University lays out warnings that journalists should heed in “Inventing American Religion: Polls, Surveys, and the Tenuous Quest for a Nation’s Faith,” due for October 1 release from Oxford University Press and previewed in the current First Things magazine.
Polls were never mathematically precise to begin with and are becoming ever more unreliable, even as they take up infinite airtime and column inches during the run-up to the 2016 presidential campaign. Wuthnow reports this billion-dollar industry with some 1,200 companies conducted more than 37,000 polls during the 2012 U.S. campaign. Election predictions have sometimes proven well off the mark, as recently with Britain, Israel, and America’s 2014 midterms. Public surveys involve not just politics but closely watched trends on key matters like consumer confidence and unemployment rates.
A poll’s fine print lists a “margin of error,” often ignored in the media, that can skew results. However, Wuthnow says today’s critically important crisis in reliability is that huge numbers don’t answer the phone, causing terribly low “response rates.”
