1/ Many times my friend @girlziplocked tried to impress upon me the importance of free-form (albeit carefully-guided) interviews, and how they're neglected in favor of polls. I agreed in theory but not practice -- mostly because I have the tools that make the later convenient.
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2/ Now, near the end of my dissertation, the deviation between the two has become almost an ever-present fear. I'm still writing up the relevant discussion section, but here's how I would put it: Polls aren't polls; they're pushes.
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3/ When we take polls and compute statistics on them, we think we're measuring what a person believes, albeit subject to sampling noise both in terms of who we picked *and what they happened to emit at the time* (think RAS).
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4/ But, it's worse than that because it's generally hard to understand *how much* the context matters to them. You (the interviewer) pushed the context on the interviewee. They'll give you a response but it's not a natural expression. It's not a poll; it's a push.
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5/ Again, this doesn't just introduce noise. A particular belief context integrates aspects of a particular person's information environment. This includes how useful that belief is as a social and asocial instrument.
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6/ Socio/economic/demographic factors induce some regularities but the decomposition is hard to obtain. When you push a context, it's even harder. On the other hand, in a free-form interviews, proffered opinions on self-selected contexts contain more of what we want to measure.
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7/ The problem is, again, interviews take skill and are way less convenient to perform. So, in a lot of ways, we just keep taking increasingly elaborate convenience samples. For want of a strong p-value, the kingdom was lost?
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8/ P.S. This is still a hot-take.
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