The Waterbury Democrat., 1944-01-03

isn't interested in political prophe- swing, the work of the bureau being limited to strictly economic fact finding. But the bureau used it's new sampling technique so effec- lively in the recent survey of con- sumer requirements that it has set the private, n-government poll takers like Crossley, Gallup and Roper to studying the results to see if their own methods may not need some revision.
 The possibility that changes in scientific sampling methods would have to be made from time to time has of course been admitted by the commercial poll taking organiza- tions. The old Literary Digest poll was accurate up to 1886, when it missed completely. Gallup's organi- zation was close in 1886 and 1940, but 1t was of in 1942.
 DEFINITE IMPROVEMENT
 The new Bureau of Census tech- nique may not represent as much of a refinement over the Gallup method as Gallup was an improve ment over the Literary Digest, but it is hailed as an improvement.
 The poll takers all get their re- suits by gathering the opinions of only limited number of people from 5000 to 60,000. In the first instance, that's approximately one out of every 43,000 people in the country. In the latter, it's one for every 2,150.s In neither case is it big sample and that may explain why you never knew anyone who was asked for his opinion in a poll The trick, of course, is to pick the right 5000 to 6O,000 people for the poll so as to get representa- tive cross section of the population, correctly divided as to geographic areas, income levels, sex, occupation, age groups and other other pre- determined classification. This is known as 'purpoSive selection" to get exactly a true percentage of each classification corresponding to the total number of people of each classification in the entire popula- tion.. Where the Literary Digest went wrong in 1886, of course, was that all of the two million straw votes it received were cast by peo- pie whose names were in phone books or owned automobiles.
 "CELL' SYSTEM USED
 Bureau of Census, for its recent poll on consumer requirements, went after the problem on 8 differ ent basis from both these others. First, by running through it's 1940 census returns, as corrected by all the intra-census studies 1t has made of population shifts since then, the bureau was able to select 68 areas or "cells" which were statistically representative of other similar areas in the United States. The deter m1nation was made as to location, population, division of rural and ur- ban population, type of farming, and other occupation. Two counties representative of each of these areas were chosen. Then from the census listing of households in all of these counties, providing perhaps 10 times as many households as it was desired to survey, a random se- lection was made of every tenth household. The census enumerators were told to go to those specific addresses to ask their questions.
 What the census poll came up with in the end was list of rough ly 4,9O0 households out of the 36.5 million households in the country, or approximately one for every 7,400 families.
 Unfortunately they weren't per- mitted to ask their 4,900 sample families who was going to be the next president.