Last night, my business phone line rang while I happened to be at my desk. It turns out it was a fairly extensive poll, conducted by Harris Interactive. Since I've recently gotten interested in polls and polling techniques, I answered the questions and took some mental notes.
The first range of questions were a bit strange; the pollster asked about how I felt about my life's achievements. Then, with an abrupt switch, he started asking about what technology terms with which I was familiar: Blu-Ray (I hadn't heard of it), DivX (I wondered if he was talking about the popular compression format, or the failed disposable-DVD technology from a few years ago), HD-DVD, etc.
Then he started asking a bunch of political questions (which is why I've filed this story under the political topic). Most of the questions had to do about the Iraq War. Whether I support the war (I wholeheartedly don't), whether I support our troops (I wholeheartedly do), how likely I was to recommend or discourage somebody from joining the military (way less now than I might have in previous decades), and so forth. The final questions were along the lines of whether I'm better off now than I was five years ago. My answer was a resounding no: nothing to do with my family or financial situation, but because the country and the world that I am a part of — and is a part of me — is much, much worse off.
Overall, I thought the poll was well-done and certainly not a biased "push poll". I'm curious about the results, naturally. I'm also slightly curious if they will have any correlation between the technology familiarity questions and the political questions. If the poll is similar in size to the one they took recently with a survey sample of 1,017, then my answers stood for nearly three hundred thousand Americans. Amazing.
Aside: I really got a kick out of the poll they released yesterday: Cliff Huxtable from The Cosby Show Tops the List of TV Dads This Father’s Day. Those who have read George Lakoff's books will know why: Lakoff uses Cosby's charaacters as a prototype for the "nuturant family". Anyhow, I'm pleased that so many Americans favor the Cosby Show kind of family, not, say, the Archie Bunker kind of family.... Perhaps there is hope for us after all, if people can better connect the dots between family values and government values.