The Role of Media in Choosing Our Candidates for National Office: Student Projects

Phone Poll

"I conducted my own phone poll. During this project I used the procedure described in All Polls Are Not Created Equal. Calling random numbers on three different days, I asked for the registered voter with the nearest birthday. First, I would ask if the voter regularly read the newspaper or in some way had followed this past November's election. Only if the respondent answered, "Yes," would I then continue the survey and ask if the names of (certain) candidates were familiar. When one hundred people had been reached that met these requirements, I ended the survey and organized the results. " OH

"I conducted a telephone survey on a basis of confidentiality. I used the telephone book as a resource and randomly chose names. I polled twelve people who lived anywhere from the Carlisle to the Shippensburg areas. I asked them if television advertisements helped them in recognizing the names of the candidates running for office. Eleven of the twelve people I polled did not know half of the candidates involved in the 1992 election." PA

"I made a list of all the people who were running for President, then I started calling people randomly out of the phone book. I called people in Eugene because I wanted it to be people I did not know. The first question I asked them was if they were registered voters, if they answered yes, then I continued. Next I would ask them to simply name all the candidates who ran for the office of President last year, that they could. The information that I gathered in my small, informal survey, supported my main topic, which was that the media only focuses on the two major political parties; the other small parties are overlooked." OR