Tamil Nadu - Chennai

Poorly designed surveys can foster deep biases: pollster

— Photo: S. R. Raghunathan

PLAUDITS FOR PSEPHOLOGIST: C.T. Kurien, chairman, Malcolm and Elizabeth Adiseshiah Trust presenting the “Malcolm Adiseshiah Award 2008” to Yogendra Yadav, Senior Fellow, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi, at a function in Chennai on Friday.

CHENNAI: Public opinion polls imitative of western protocols run the risk of undermining, rather than reinforcing democracy, Yogendra Yadav, psephologist and Senior Fellow, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi, said on Friday.

Delivering a speech, after receiving the eighth “Malcolm Adiseshiah Award” instituted by the Malcolm and Elizabeth Adiseshiah (M&EA) Trust, Mr. Yadav said the theoretical framework within which the numerical data gathered during opinion polls was analysed became all the more relevant in a country like India, where millions of voters exercised their franchise on a single day.

“Poorly designed opinion polling can foster deep biases in the existing political structure,” he said.

Calling for survey research exercises that had “clarity and modesty,” he advocated the “transfer of (Western) ideas instead of transplanting them.”

Pointing out that the study of public opinion was as vital to political science as the phenomenon of inflation was to economics, Mr. Yadav said the danger of a badly framed opinion poll or one that was sponsored by a corporate with a vested interest was that it could parade the views of the elite as representative of those of the commoners.

At the same time, quality survey research had the power to deepen democratic functions and restore the voice of the layman in public discourse, he said.

Advocating public funding for routine gathering of public opinion, Mr. Yadav said the mechanism should be detached from the ruling party of the time.

Engaging a research institute for such an exercise would not be difficult given India’s legacy of institutions devoted to social sciences, he said.

He identified as one of the fundamental challenges of survey research in India the task of developing field work protocols.

He pointed out that the face-to-face interview had completely been replaced with telephone call-ups and Internet interfaces in North America whereas it was integral to the Indian pollster’s toolkit. On his own work, he remarked that running an opinion poll that employed 19 languages still left room for improvement.

It was also important to examine more closely who was commissioning a survey and to what end. “These questions are more pertinent to survey research than any other form of social science inquiry … in the older democracies opinion polling is done by private companies and is dictated by their bottom line.”

Mr. Yadav said a theoretically oriented yet empirically grounded engagement with politics should be the fulcrum of the future of political science in India. Survey research could engage with other streams such as anthropology or political history, and most importantly it should steer clear of the three most damning charges it had faced since the 1960s — that the discipline was “methodologically naïve, politically conservative and culturally inauthentic.”

C.T. Kurien, chairman, M&EA Trust, said a deep understanding of poverty was fundamental to any alleviation attempt; otherwise, there was the danger of development being confused with delivery of essentials.

Pointing out that good development concepts recognised the centrality of the people, he called for greater interaction between development studies and political science.

H.B.N. Shetty, executive trustee, M&EA Trust; V.K. Natraj, trustee, and R. Srinivasan, Reader, University of Madras, spoke.

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