Public Opinion Quarterly 60:181-227 (1996)
© 1996 American Association for Public Opinion Research
MAIL SURVEYS FOR ELECTION FORECASTING?
AN EVALUATION OF THE COLUMBUS DISPATCH POLL
PENNY s. VISSER is a doctoral candidate in the department of psychology at Ohio State University and JON A. KROSNICK is an associate professor in the departments of psychology and political science at Ohio State University, JESSE MARQUETTE is a professor of political science and director of the Survey Research Center at the University of Akron. MICHAEL CURTIN is the editor of the Columbus Dispatch. This research was supported by grant SBR-9503822 from the National Science Foundation to Jon A. Krosnick and by grant T32-MH19728-03 from the National Institute of Mental Health, which provided a prcdoctoral fellowship to Penny S. Visser. We thank Andy Smith and Al Tuchfarber from the University of Cincinnati for providing information on their preelection surveys, and Jim Hunter from the Columbus Dispatch for archival assistance. We also thank Richard Carson, Robert Cameron Mitchell, and Stanley Presser for helpful comments on an earlier draft.
Correspondence regarding this article should be addressed to Penny S. Visser or Jon A. Krosnick, Department of Psychology, Ohio State University, 1885 Neil Avenue, Columbus, OH 43210 (E-mail visser.104{at}osu.edu or krosnick{at}osu.edu)
Because of slow turnaround time and typically low response rates, mail surveys have generally been considered of little value in election forecasting. However, statewide mail surveys conducted by the Columbus Dispatch newspaper since 1980 have made remarkably accurate forecasts of Ohio election outcomes. In comparison to statewide surveys by two other organizations employing conventional telephone interview methods, the mail surveys were consistently more accurate and were generally less susceptible to sources of inaccuracy such as high rolloff and low publicity. The mail survey's advantage is attributable at least in part to larger sample sizes, sampling and response procedures that yielded more representative samples of voters, lack of the need to allocate undecided respondents, and superior questionnaire design. These findings suggest that mail surveys not only may be viable alternatives to telephone surveys but may actually be superior to them under some conditions. Further-more, these results demonstrate that surveys with low response rates are not necessarily low in validity.
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