I clicked on the option to search the full text (instead of just the titles and keywords) and then searched using online AND fill in AND census Then I clicked on the link described as Census Bureau, Census 2000, Director Prewitt press briefing on November 22, 1999 website CENSUS DIRECTOR KENNETH PREWITT: Good morning. Our current mail response rate, as you know, stands at 55 percent, and as you also will recall our operational and budget planning was based upon a resp... http://www.census.gov/dmd/www/apr4pressbr.html Size: 62 K, Score: 80%
When I used the Edit/Find in Page Command, using online, and searched repeatedly for this word. I found the following:
QUESTION: In light of all these attempts to raise the response rate, I'm wondering why the agency has downplayed the ability of recipients of the short form to answer their questionnaires online?
MR. PREWITT: Did you say why we haven't? Downplayed it, I'm sorry, I didn't quite hear you.
Planning a census does take about 10 or 12 years. We already have major committees at work planning the 2010 census. This census started to get planned in 1990. The operations are actually very big and complicated. And the Internet, of course, in 1989 was not a prominent part of American society. And we had to put our operations out there. As we got closer to this census, and realized that the Internet was an opportunity that we should be using, we made it available. That is, we decided to design some software, make it available for people to do the short form. We then asked ourselves exactly the question you're now asking, to what extent should we publicize it and promote it?
The decision that we made is that because the Internet is, at this stage, very inequitably distributed across the American society, and since our focus was on especially getting people we have a hard time reaching, we would spend all of our advertising dollars trying to reach the population groups which we had reason to believe would be undercounted. Those we do not believe are going to be the Internet responders. We think that the Internet responders, whether that number is 60,000 or 6 million, are people from whom we would have gotten a paper form. Therefore, we're going to get their answers, we ought to spend our time and effort trying to get the answers from the people we might not get an answer from. So we made that simple decision. We're a reasonably cautious organization. We do not like to put new, big operations in place where we haven't had a chance to test them. And at that stage, this is in 1998-99 when this conversation came up, we had not yet had the opportunity to test Internet responses in a census environment. So we thought the most prudent thing to do was to allow it, to test it, to see how well it worked, and then to decide on the basis of that how major a push to put by 2010, and I'm sure we'll put a major push on it in 2010.
So it's a long, convoluted answer, and I apologize for that. But it's not because we didn't want them, it's because we wanted to make sure they would work well. We had to worry about encryption, of course. We have now a heightened conversation about privacy in the country. And we wanted to make certain that we would have nobody who would say, oh my goodness, somebody else got my answer, because I filed by Internet. So we had to be extremely cautious. And that's why we downplayed it slightly for 2000.
I typed in +"Harris Poll Online" and found the page http://vr.harrispollonline.com/register/ It told me that: Policy makers, business leaders and the media rely on the Harris Poll to produce accurate, reliable information on topics as diverse as our participants. In fact, the Harris Poll has surveyed millions of people from more than 90 countries in the past 40 years.
Now we'd like to know what you think! Here's your invitation to participate in our convenient, new way to take the public pulse--the Harris Poll Online. Unlike old-fashioned surveys, the Harris Poll Online produces accurate, reliable information at Internet speed. As a member of the Harris Poll Online, you'll get to express your opinions when you wish, rather than when we wish.
This last paragraph has the biases right in it!
USATODAY.com frequently publishes the results of both scientific opinion polls and online reader surveys. Sometimes the topics of these two very different types of public opinion sampling are similar but the results appear very different. It is important that readers understand the difference between the two.
USA TODAY/CNN/Gallup polling is a scientific phone survey taken from a random sample of U.S. residents and weighted to reflect the population at large. This is a process that has been used and refined for more than 50 years. Scientific polling of this type has been used to predict the outcome of elections with considerable accuracy.
Online surveys, such as USATODAY.com's "Quick Question," are not scientific and reflect the views of a self-selected slice of the population. People using the Internet and answering online surveys tend to have different demographics than the nation as a whole and as such, results will differ -- sometimes dramatically -- from scientific polling.
USATODAY.com will clearly label results from the various types of surveys for the convenience of our readers.
Rest of polling stuff has similar issues as aboveBiases: Circles of larger area are more likely to be hit since they take up more of the page. Sometimes one can't see the mark left. Sometimes the pencil hits blank space instead of a circle. One is more likely to hit circles in the center of the page as most people will subconsciously be worried about missing the paper altogether and will then concentrate on the center, even though their eyes are closed...
Biases: This method has none of the biases mentioned above. Each circle has an equally likely chance of getting hit since the table is of random digits.
Since the table of random digits method isn't biased, over the long term, it should yield more accurage results.