Grammar Matters

While it isn't about polling per se, this Washington Post article illustrates how "loaded" terminology can affect the way people respond to prompts for their opinions about political and policy matters.

Consider the example of how people respond differently to different terms used to denote a tax on inheritance:

An "estate tax" is more likely to garner popular support than a "death tax," even though they're the same thing.

A pollster interested in determining the public's views on such taxes would likely get very different results depending on which phrase s/he decides to use in a questionnaire.

The article's main point, though, is that it's not just word choice that matters -- it turns out people's responses are affected by more subtle grammatical structures as well. Perhaps not a lot of people could explain the differences among the various past tenses, but the article suggests that they react differently to prompts depending on which conjugation is used by discussing the results of an experiment performed on undergraduate student subjects:

Half saw "Last year, Mark was having an affair with his assistant and was taking hush money from a prominent constituent." The other half saw this: "Last year, Mark had an affair with his assistant and took hush money from a prominent constituent." The difference is one of grammatical aspect: "was having" and "was taking" are known as the imperfect aspect, meaning an event may be continuing. But "had" and "took" are known as the perfect aspect, meaning the event is bounded in time.

Although the differences may seem subtle, they had a strong impact on the readers. More than three-quarters of students who read the imperfect aspect phrases said they were confident that Johnson would not be reelected, whereas only about half who read the perfect aspect phrases felt this way.

In short, it's not just which words you use that can affect poll results -- how you incorporate even the most well-chosen words into sentence stuctures can have a big impact as well.