12:28
Kenya NGO Jobs
Kenya can be credited with
being one of the few countries in Africa that has stable and consistent
pollsters who are able to operate freely and without control from government
and other interested parties. The opinion polls however do come with
varied findings, although the pollsters have attempted to explain the
varied findings. Most explain the differences to be as a result of the variance
in their research design.
Estimates
based on the Standard Newspaper Online Report, See
here
While the trend of opinion
polling is encouraging and vital in a democratic system, such as Kenya,
pollsters and the public needs to watch out for particular concerns regarding
validity and reliability of such polls. In a society as diverse as Kenya, and one
in which election is characterized and influenced by ethnicity, errors are
almost inevitable. The acceptable scale of errors becomes the major question.
In the past, certain opinion
polls have resulted in large inaccuracies all over the globe. The USA is a good
case in study. Labovitz and Hagedorn (1971) in their book “Introduction to
Social Research”, give several cases in which opinion polls misled the public
with regard to elections. I will use two cases here to explain my case.
In one case, the writers indicate that, in the Literary Digest Poll of
over two million persons that predicted, in 1936, a landslide victory for Alf
Landon over Franklin Roosevelt.
Of course, the 1936 election overwhelmingly favoured Roosevelt. The poll had
erred by approximately 20 percentage points.
A second instance occurred when
in 1948, when polls by Gallup and others forecasted the wrong winner of a
presidential election. Some polls showed that Harry Truman would receive less
than 45% of the popular vote, when on the contrary; he received just about 50%
of the votes and, of course won the election.
These cases show how polls may
mislead the public and worse, contestants into false confidence. In the Kenyan
case, in 2007, despite several polls tipping Raila Odinga as the winner of the
election by comfortable margins, the results, however controversial, give us an
indication of just how misguiding opinion polls can be.
I am a strong believer of
research, as a matter of fact, I am a researcher. However, research is faced by
a common problem of generalizability. In this case therefore, however genuine
polls in Kenya might be, the ability of such findings to be generalized as a
representation of the opinion of Kenyans remains questionable. The accuracy of
the polls, as any person would say, remains to be seen come the March, 2013
results. Contestants in the 2013 elections should beware lest they have false
perception in their popularity or their lack of it. Until then, however, Prime
Minister Raila Odinga remains the man to beat.
