Polls don't have to be filled with questions about what you would do, leaving room for inaccurate self-prediction. The questions could be "have you in the past month done x" which tend to be a bit closer to reality.
Also, certain techniques (randomizing the order of the poll questions for each visitor) and statistical functions can be used to get more accurate information from those polled.
But you're right, if done improperly you can get wildly inaccurate data (just look at past or current presidential election polls)
True, you can setup the polls and question to reduce the problems but they are all still there since you still asking the user rather than measuring the actual behavior.
I.e., polls are a form of proxy for what you really want to learn but can't get directly. Your example of voting polls is a great example of this... Until the actual election, we can't know and so polling is about as good as we can get. (But I won't even bother to mention all of the games that are played with the polling to manipulate the outcomes. :-( )
Comments
Polls don't have to be filled with questions about what you would do, leaving room for inaccurate self-prediction. The questions could be "have you in the past month done x" which tend to be a bit closer to reality.
Also, certain techniques (randomizing the order of the poll questions for each visitor) and statistical functions can be used to get more accurate information from those polled.
But you're right, if done improperly you can get wildly inaccurate data (just look at past or current presidential election polls)
True, you can setup the polls and question to reduce the problems but they are all still there since you still asking the user rather than measuring the actual behavior.
I.e., polls are a form of proxy for what you really want to learn but can't get directly. Your example of voting polls is a great example of this... Until the actual election, we can't know and so polling is about as good as we can get. (But I won't even bother to mention all of the games that are played with the polling to manipulate the outcomes. :-( )