Boston Herald Refuses to Release Questions Asked in Poll

MassNews Staff
July 16, 2002

The Boston Herald has refused to release any of the data concerning the poll it says was taken of 402 persons about the Protection of Marriage Amendment, including the questions that were asked and the demographics of the people to whom they talked, although this violates professional ethical standards.

The Herald poll says that 52% oppose the Amendment although this flies in the face of every other poll on the subject.

In a poll taken this year of 500 persons by Wirthlin Worldwide, 86% disagreed with the statement that "marriage is an old-fashioned outmoded institution," and 81% agreed that it is better for children to be raised in a household with a married mother and father. The majority of persons agree that about 60% of the citizens favor the Amendment.

This refusal to release the questionnaire and the demographics makes it impossible for objective observers to determine if the results cited in this article are credible. An official at RKM Research and Communications, Portsmouth, N.H., refused to release any information about the polling.

In addition, the sample size used for this survey, 400 respondents, is smaller than the typical sample size for a state or commonwealth the size of Massachusetts.

According to the Herald this poll was conducted on a Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. Fridays and Saturdays are days on which it is generally more difficult to reach "family values" conservatives because these people are consumed with family activities at these times.

In addition, women are most likely to oppose the Amendment. In the Vermont legislature, the men legislators voted against civil unions, with only 41 favoring it and 60 against, while the women voted for it by a four-to-one margin of 35-9. The final vote was 76 in favor and 69 against. But the Herald won't tell how many of the persons in their poll were women, whether they were married or whether they lived in cities, etc.

The Wirthlin poll was 500 adults 18-years or older, randomly generated and stratified by county according to census population data. In addition, the sample was validated according to gender, age, and educational attainment to ensure accurate representation of the county's adult population. the margin of error for a sample size of 500 is 4.38 percentage points in 95 out of 100 cases.

Violates Code of Ethics

The code of ethics for the American Association of Public Opinion researchers states in Section III of the code:

Good professional practice imposes the obligation upon all public opinion researchers to include, in any report of research results, or to make available when that report is released, certain essential information about how the research was conducted. At a minimum, the following items should be disclosed:

1) Who sponsored the survey, and who conducted it.
2) The exact wording of questions asked, including the text of any preceding instruction or explanation to the interviewer or respondents that might reasonably be expected to affect the response …

Source: AAPO website (www.aapor.org/ethics/code.html)