Do I just think to much, or is the quality of poll questions on the Internet terrible? Online polls are
ubiquitous, yet they all seem to be so
bad. Take
this one (please!) from CNN: "Will the United Nations conduct an objective investigation into what happened at the Jenin refugee camp?" "Yes" and "No" are the two choices. It's actually clearer than many CNN polls, but it's still ambigious. It's attached to a story about how the UN may not investigate, after all. I
think it's trying to ask, "If the UN goes ahead with its investigation of Jenin, will it be objective?" and not "Will the UN go ahead with its investigation?" (How should I know?) Most of them are more like this one,
"Should Mexicans in the United States illegally be granted residency (Yes/No)?" Er, what, all of them? And granted residency exactly how? It's a complicated issue distilled down to a single-sentence yes/no question. Even the ones on dumb subjects are dumb, like
Are you worried your biological clock will go off before you have children?" What does that even
mean? "Are you worried you're going to want to have children before you have children?" Or do they mean "Are you worried you're going to have trouble having children when you want to?" And if so, why is it just yes/no and not have the options, "I don't ever want children" and "I'm going to have children when I'm young to avoid that problem?" Both of them are encompassed in "no," along with "I have my head in the sand am not at all concerned with the fact that it's harder to have kids when you're older."
And here's a beauty: "Will World AIDS Day be effective?" Effective at what? Preventention? Helping a cure? Getting press? If you mean generating idiotic polls on CNN.com, I'd guess the answer is pretty apparent. Although 84% of the people responding thought that it wouldn't be effective. At whatever.
