Week 2: Representative Surveys

Published

January 18, 2023

Overview

We start the topic of public opinion with representative surveys. As the name suggests, a representative survey is administered to a sample of respondents that resemble the demographic characteristics of the underlying population.

The punchline of this week is that conducting a true representative survey via random sampling is near impossible. Instead, most surveys use some form of quota or stratified sampling to ensure that the sample obtained resembles the population of interest.

The lab assignment for this week will be a guided introduction to R. By the end, we will compare different sampling techniques.

Reading

Slides

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Lab

Intro to R and sampling from populations

Due

Friday, January 20, 5 PM