One (smallish) point I left out of my discussion of opinion polling a few days ago was that the “margin of error” for a 95% confidence interval varies according to the reported score.
This range of possible error is actually highest for parties or opinions that score 50% – which is more or less where the “no” vote in the Scottish referendum is polling now – for a 1000 sample poll with 95% confidence interval the range at 50% is:
Good news for the yes camp? Not really, because apart from the obvious point that it is mathematically equally likely to be an over-estimate as an under-estimate, the corollary is that the error in smaller figures is less. For 30%, roughly where the yes campaign are, the error is:
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- One thing the Scottish referendum campaign can do without: polling voodoo (cartesianproduct.wordpress.com)
cartesian product ... stuff about computing mostly 