I subscribe to this thing where I take a variety of Ipsos polls every so often. I reckon I should do it because a) it’s quick, and b) people like me with oddball opinions need to be in market research polls too. I vaguely get points, but who’s kidding who? It’s not as if they’re worth anything useful.
Tonight’s was unobtrusively about mobile phone brands and operators, and then suddenly segued into which countries you’d like to see join the EU. Ipsos like that sort of thing - “Hi! We’ve got 15 questions for you, but if you don’t use shampoo so the first 10 are pretty much moot, we’d like to ask you 5 other questions about car insurance anyway.”
They’re rubbish at user-interface stuff, though. Or, for that matter, question design. Consider the following.
In your opinion, what minimal conditions should a country meet in order to be able to join the EU?
(Please choose maximum 3 answers)
- A simple desire to join
- It should meet certain basic standards of democracy and human rights
- It should be able to apply the EU’s rules properly
- Its economy should be in line with the rest of the EU
- It should fit in with the cultural and religious traditions of the rest of the EU
- It should not ask too much from the EU Budget
- Other (specify)
- No other country should join, the EU is large enough as it is
- Don’t know
Or maybe not. After all, if someone wants to answer “I don’t know”, “No other country should join” and “A country should be able to join if it wants to”, then arguably that’s an answer. Pollsters aren’t required, or for that matter even asked to make sure that people make sense. Still, it irks me.
(Incidentally, “cultural and religious traditions” sounds like this is a partisan poll. I personally vehemently disagree with the notion that people who share our cultural traditions also share our religious traditions.)
Oh, and from the page after that, who really believes that “Enlargement will help reduce organized crime and drug smuggling” ? What on Earth does that have to do with letting Polish people work in Germany?
Oh, wait. It then asks me whether I ever read the Mirror, Sun, Mail or the Times. It doesn’t ask about the Star, Express, Guardian, Independent or Telegraph, so I don’t know what use that question is, frankly. It then witters on about websites, and banking decisions on behalf of companies; asks which bank you’re with, without mentioning most banks (most criminally, the Royal Bank of Scotland, which owns NatWest); then asks questions about whether you’re planning on breeding. Very strange.
