Inaccurate Polls About Drinking on College Campus

Many survey polls are not accurate. People tend to use only a sample which is not a good thing because people can lie skewing the results. Sometimes they will lie to make themselves sound better, or to be part of the "in" crowd.

There are many reasons why polls sometime seem to good to be true. Two of those reasons include political parties polling certain areas and only small groups or samples get polled. Political parties who conduct poll surveys only survey where they know they will get a good answer. An example of this is when the political parties need to raise the approval rating of their candidate/the President. Why risk having the poll end up low when they know where to survey for good answers? Doing something like that is pointless because it would criticize the very reason you put the poll out there to begin with. This could be with any poll or survey conducted by anybody. The other reason is about who and how many people get polled. There was a poll at my school about drinking on campus and how much. It gave statistics about if you drink, and about how many per week did that person consume. One of the main reasons that statistics about this poll was that only about one or two thousand people was polled. The school size is much larger than that. This is a problem because there are many, many more people on campus. This idea can also be used towards any other kind of poll.

One of the other big reasons is people lie. Many people will lie and say that they don't drink. Usually this is said because they don't want to get in trouble in case it gets back to parents or they don't want to seem like they are big partiers when they try to keep it on the down low. Sometimes other peers will think that you are a big partier just because you say you drink. This could also be viewed as a good idea; someone thinking that you are a party animal. There are a lot of students who think that you are cool if you drink. Also, if someone were to say that they drank, they sometimes lie about how much they drink, for the same reasons.