OpEdNews - Diary: OEN Poll Demographics Analysis Goes Live

When you commission a poll through a national pollster, like OEN has done, you don't just get the simple number, like we've been showing in our polls. The pollstersy also provide analysis by gender, age, income, ideology, party, etc. TV broadcasters sometimes mention these. Now, with a mouseclick, you can see demographic analysis for all the polls we do on OEN.

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Here's a link to a polls page that has a column that lists all the recent polls in the POLLS column. You can always access that link by using the polls

link in the navigation bar on the left hand side of the front/home page of OEN.

We think we're the first news site on the entire web to offer such a feature, perhaps the first site altogether. Some caveats:

1-Because this is based on whoever takes the poll, and not a representative sample of people from an area, it is not a scientific poll that can predict, like some polls attempt to do. It has meaning for the people who frequent this site, who lean left.

2-The demographic results are only based upon the votes of people who took the poll who answered the demographic questions. If you have not answered the demographic question, you will not be able to see the result for that demographic question. There will be a link for you to go to your profile page so you can answer the questions so you can see the results. Your answers are kept private. Only the webmaster, me and less than five managing editors can see the private data.

3- We are still working on this project, with more to appear in the days to come. The charts you see today plot horizontally. The Red bar is the highest stat for the ROW and the statistics in the cell represent the row. By Thursday, and possibly sooner, we'll be doing analysis by the column, as well.

4- We are not experts at polling or statistics. If you know something about this and see problems with these first steps, please let us know and we'll explore how to implement your suggestions. We've already begun that process and have decided, for now, not to include chi-squared stats.

5-The more people who fill in their demographic information, and the more who answer the polls, the more interesting the results will be.

6- Remember, we've built our polls so, if you have a group, you can see the basic results of the polls just for your group.

We seek your feedback on this project.

Please post your comments-- suggestions reactions, questions. From the comments and this post, we'll create an FAQ. Make a suggestion we love and it could become a part of the program.