Polling: Triumphs and Tribulations

This blog piece was written by one of our students, Zukai. The opinions expressed herein do not reflect those of Civitas other than respect for the value of open dialogue.

Clayton at 1:00 pm. The Civitas internship group had just finished talking with the Saint Louis County Council and Executive. We split up based on pairs of people who made polls together. My partner was Corvin, and we both thought about going to Shaw Park. Before we split up, we were told that we should generally avoid private businesses unless we were familiar with the staff. 

On our way to Shaw Park, we crossed the location of my job, and we decided to see if they would take our polls during the off hours, but unfortunately, they had not come in yet so we continued on toward Shaw Park. Still, this had left an impact on us as we had been thinking of the intricacies of polling people we know (which could affect the data we collect if someone is embarrassed to admit something that we would jot down) and polling at a private location (although the polls were anonymous, coworkers might hear your responses as you gave them).

As we reached Shaw Park we discussed further criteria for who we should ask to take the polls. Leaving out certain people could lead to skewed data so we had to treat these criteria with the utmost consideration. Although they would change throughout the course of the polling session, for the most part, they stayed consistent in the core ideas. Our first-draft criteria were that we wouldn’t talk to elementary-age kids, people on calls, or those who seemed busy (or in a rush to be somewhere according to our judgment) and if someone claimed they were busy or couldn’t talk even if we doubted it we had to let it go and thank them for their time. Clearly, a lot was left up to interpretation but for our first round of polling, we just wanted it to be without serious issues.

Our first location was the Shaw Park tennis courts where we passed by some older gentlemen on a separate court and were excited at the prospect of getting the older demographic on our polls as we expected to come across mostly young adults. When asked, they, unfortunately, declined as they were in a tennis lesson so we moved on. Going to the main courts that have dividers in between, we saw a lot of people ranging from teens to adults. Our plan was to each take one person at a time and not overlap our polls as we had the same polls so the data would be redundant. The group we asked in the first section of the courts was between the ages of 14-16 so we were all of the same age range and our polling went pretty smoothly. After this first success, we decided to move on to the second section, but that is when disaster struck.

At the second court, there were children and young adults playing separate games so we decided to approach the men who looked to be young adults, but as we did this a man walked over to us and told us to get off the court immediately. We were confused but he still continued saying, “the nerve of some people walking up to children, this is a private tennis camp”. As we stated earlier we didn’t want any problems so we walked away. In hindsight, we were still wearing dress clothes from our meeting with the county council and my partner had a constitution from there in his shirt pocket so along with the clipboards we looked like stereotypical door-to-door preachers and he wouldn’t be able to tell whether we were walking to the children or the others. Still, his anger was quite jarring so as we walked away we apologized to the people in the first section of the court who turned out to not have been affiliated with the camp anyways. 

What struck us from this experience was that polling really can be degrading. We hear people talk about it but experiencing it firsthand was something different. Moving on from the courts, we walked around the park polling various people, getting repeatedly declined, and adjusting our criteria to not ask parents walking around with their children. We did also adjust the criteria to include more people as we walked up to people reading or who seemed to be heading towards important business based on their attire and documents. Possibly because we were closer to the county council, these people openly answered our questions and even offered to take some polls and ask others for us!

In the end, we learned about the many decisions people who take polls have to make to get accurate data and the hardships they may face in the process. Hopefully, this blog showed a glimpse of what surveying has to offer for those interested.