What Is Public Opinion Polling and Why Is It Important?

What's a public opinion poll?

A scientific, nonbiased public opinion poll is a type of survey or inquiry designed to measure the public's views regarding a particular topic or series of topics. Trained interviewers ask questions of people chosen at random from the population being measured. Responses are given, and interpretations are made based on the results. It is important in a random sample that everyone in the population being studied has an equal chance of participating. Otherwise, the results could be biased and, therefore, not representative of the population. Representative samples are chosen in order to make generalizations about a particular population being studied.

Why are opinion polls important?

Polls tell us what proportion of a population has a specific viewpoint. They do not explain why respondents believe as they do or how to change their minds. This is the work of social scientists and scholars. Polls are simply a measurement tool that tells us how a population thinks and feels about any given topic.

This can be useful in helping different cultures understand one another because it gives the people a chance to speak for themselves instead of letting only vocal media stars speak on behalf of all. Opinion polling gives people who do not usually have access to the media an opportunity to be heard.

How are the surveys conducted?

Two of the most common ways in which public opinion polls are conducted are telephone and face-to-face interviews. Other methods include mail, online, and self-administered surveys.

How are face-to-face samples selected?

Such surveys, also known as “in-person” interviews, are conducted with the interviewer and the interviewee next to each other. The interviewer reads material from the questionnaire and records the interviewee’s responses. At times the interviewer may hand a card to the respondent for him/her to select a response(s).

Scientific face-to-face surveys are normally conducted using geographic-area probability sampling. Some refer to this as “block sampling.” This is done by dividing a given population into blocks of roughly equal population density. Each block is further divided into blocks until a single household is chosen at random, and then a single respondent is randomly chosen from the household.

How does one read opinion polls?

Percentages in an opinion poll reflect the proportion of a given population that has a particular response. If the results of a scientific poll claiming a 3-point margin of error say that 30% of Americans like ice cream, this means that if we asked all Americans this question, we would expect between 27% and 33% to say they like ice cream.

How are scientific polls different from other polls?

When a radio or TV station asks its listeners to call in to vote on a particular issue, the results of this activity are not scientific because the sample is not representative. The sample reflects only the people who happen to be watching or listening to the show and are motivated to call in. This cannot be generalized to represent the whole population because the respondents were not randomly selected, and therefore, they are not representative.

RELATED PROGRAMMING: ROBERT MERRY WITH PETER HART | APR 23, 2021

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BIOGRAPHY | SAM SHEPARD

The Farmer’s Son

Born in Illinois in 1943, Samuel Shepard Rogers III (known as Steve Rogers as boy) was the son of a former Army pilot and a teacher. His family moved frequently and eventually settled on an avocado farm in Duarte, California. Duarte would become the suburb where True West takes place. Shepard’s father became more alcoholic and nomadic, like the absent father that hovers over True West and other Shepard plays. Shepard worked as a stablehand, an orange picker, and a sheep shearer while attending high school and later studied agriculture at nearby Mt. San Antonio Junior College. He dropped out of school to join a travelling theatre company and eventually moved to New York City.

Rock and Roll Playwright

In New York, 19-year-old Shepard found inspiration in rock, jazz, and Samuel Beckett’s plays. He worked as a waiter at the Village Gate nightclub, shared an apartment with the son of jazz legend Charles Mingus, wrote songs with John Cale and Bob Dylan, and played drums for a rock group called The Holy Modal Rounders. Reflecting on this time, he later told an interviewer, “I got into writing plays because I had nothing else to do. So I started writing to keep from going off the deep end.” In 1964, his first play Cowboys received a favorable review from The Village Voice and launched his theatre career. Informed by Jackson Pollock's abstract expressionism and science fiction, his early plays were poetic and hallucinogenic, often incorporating rock and jazz music. He worked in experimental downtown spaces such as La Mama, Cafe Cino, and the Open Theatre, winning six Obie (off-Broadway) Awards over the next few years. In 1969 he married actress and musician O-Lan Jones, and they remained married until 1983. His passion remained divided between theatre and music, and in 1975 Shepard joined a group of musicians (including Joni Mitchell and Joan Baez) to tour with Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Road.

Playwright-in-Residence

Theatre ultimately won out when Shepard opted to settle in San Francisco as playwright-in-residence at the Magic Theatre in 1975. Over the next 10 years, he wrote his most seminal plays, including Fool for Love, True West, and Buried Child. Shepard recalled his father coming to a performance of the latter play and berating the actors on stage. “He took it personally and he was drunk... he was kicked out and then was readmitted once he confessed to being my father. And then he started yelling at the actors again.” By the mid-1980s, as he reached his forties, Shepard was the second most widely-performed American playwright after Tennessee Williams.

WATCH: REMEMBERING SAM SHEPARD

WATCH: SAM SHEPARD ON HIS FAMILY

The Intrepid Artist-Cowboy

In addition to play-writing, Shepard had a successful career as an actor. His first film role was as a dying farmer in Days of Heaven (1978). He appeared in Lewis Carlino’s Resurrection in 1980. His breakthrough came playing Chuck Yeager in The Right Stuff (1983). Biographer John J. Winters wrote that this role established Shepard’s on-screen persona as “the intrepid artist-cowboy of popular imagination,” which would blur with his writing. Other notable movies include Baby Boom (1987), Steel Magnolias (1989), and the Ethan Hawke Hamlet (2000) in which he played Hamlet’s father. He was last seen as the family patriarch in the 2017 Netflix series “Bloodline.” He also wrote several screenplays, including Wim Wenders’s Paris, Texas (1984 Cannes Film Festival Winner) and Silent Tongue (1994), a Western that he also directed.

A Western Sunset  

Sam Shepard and Jessica Lange began a decades-long relationship in 1983 and had two children: Hannah and Samuel Walker. The two broke up in 2009 but did not announce that they had parted ways until 2011.

In 2000, Shephard bought a small farm in Kentucky, where he raised horses, continued writing, and enjoyed a low-profile life. Shepard died in 2017 from complications of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), or Lou Gehrig’s disease. He left behind more than 55 plays, two collections of short stories, and a novel.

SOURCE: Roundabout Theatre Company

RELATED PROGRAMMING: CURSE OF THE STARVING CLASS | JUN 11-20, 2021

ABOUT | EINE KLEINE NACHTMUSIK

The real title for this perennial Mozart favourite is Serenade No. 13 in G, although it’s the informal title of 'Eine Kleine Nachtmusik' that has stuck.

The more common name of this landmark work from 1787 comes courtesy of Mozart’s obsessively organised side, a character trait about which we rarely hear. Despite possessing a brain that could remember music with 100% cent precision, Mozart kept a detailed log of everything he’d written, just in case. The title 'Eine Kleine NachtMusik' is what he jotted next to the entry for this particular serenade written for a string quartet with an added double-bass. It’s another piece from his great purple patch. He was just thirty-one years old.

One frustrating by-product of Mozart’s personal catalogue of all his works is that we also know that there were originally five movements of this work, rather than the four that now survive. Oddly enough, Mozart never published 'Eine Kleine Nachtmusik' in his lifetime. It was left up to his widow, Constanze, to sell it in a job lot of his music to a publisher in 1799, presumably to raise much needed cash. It saw public light of day only in 1827, some forty years after it was written.

SOURCE: ClassicFm

RELATED PROGRAMMING | EINE KLEINE NACHTMUSIK

BIOGRAPHY | DAVID LAWRENCE

Jacob Lawrence (1917-2000) was one the most renowned African American artist of his time. Known for producing narrative collections like the Migration Series and War Series, he illustrated the African American experience using vivid colors set against Black and brown figures. He also served as a professor of art at the University of Washington for 15 years.

Early Life and Career

Born in Atlantic City, New Jersey, on September 7, 1917, Jacob Lawrence moved with his parents to Easton, Pennsylvania, at the age of two. After his parents split in 1924, his mother sent him, along with two other siblings, to a foster care facility in Philadelphia, while she looked for work in New York. At 13, Lawrence and his siblings reunited with their mother who was residing in Harlem.

Encouraging him to explore the arts, Lawrence's mother enrolled him at Utopia Children’s Center, which had an after-school art program. Although he dropped out of school at the age of 16, he continued taking classes at the Harlem Art Workshop with under the mentorship of artist Charles Alston and frequently visited the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

'The Migration Series'

In 1937 Lawrence won a scholarship to the American Artists School in New York. When he graduated in 1939, he received funding from the Works Progress Administration Federal Art Project. He had already developed his own style of modernism, and began creating narrative series, painting 30 or more paintings on one subject. He completed his best-known series, Migration of the Negro or simply The Migration Series, in 1941. The series was exhibited at Edith Halpert's Downtown Gallery in 1942, making Lawrence the first African American to join the gallery.

World War II and After

At the outbreak of World War II, Lawrence was drafted into the United States Coast Guard. After being briefly stationed in Florida and Massachusetts, he was assigned to be the Coast Guard artist aboard a troopship, documenting the war experience as he traveled around the world. During this time, he produced close to 50 paintings but all ended up being lost.

'War Series'

When his tour of duty ended, Lawrence received a Guggenheim Fellowship and painted his War Series. He was also invited by Josef Albers to teach the summer session at Black Mountain College in North Carolina. Albers reportedly hired a private train car to transport Lawrence and his wife to the college so they wouldn’t be forced to transfer to the “colored” car when the train crossed the Mason-Dixon Line.

When he returned to New York, Lawrence continued honing his craft but began struggling with depression. In 1949 he admitted himself into Hillside Hospital in Queens, staying for close to a year. As a patient at the facility, he produced artwork that reflected his emotional state, incorporating subdued colors and melancholy figures in his paintings, which was a sharp contrast to his other works.

In 1951, Lawrence painted works based on memories of performances at the Apollo Theater in Harlem. He also began teaching again, first at Pratt Institute and later the New School for Social Research and the Art Students League.

Teaching and Commissions

In 1971 Lawrence accepted a tenured position as a professor at University of Washington in Seattle, where he taught until he retired in 1986. In addition to teaching, he spent much of the rest of his life painting commissions, producing limited-edition prints to help fund nonprofits like the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, the Children’s Defense Fund and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. He also painted murals for the Harold Washington Center in Chicago, the University of Washington and Howard University, as well as a 72-foot mural for New York City’s Times Square subway station.

Death

Lawrence painted until a few weeks before he died, on June 9, 2000.

SOURCE: Biography

RELATED PROGRAMMING | ART TALKS: DAVID LAWRENCE | MAR 10, 2021

ON SCREEN

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With state-of-the-art filming techniques, tailored to every play, National Theatre Live and Broadway HD capture each performance as it happens, in all its glory. From close-ups that capture every flicker of emotion, to sweeping wide shots of the stage.

Plays are filmed in front of a live theatre audience, but everything is optimized for the BIG screen so it’s the next best thing to being there!

The actors on stage deliver their performances as they normally would any other night. But, to make sure audiences watching in theaters around the world have the best seat in the house, cameras are positioned to capture each production — and technical teams make sure every element on stage such as lighting and hair and make-up look fantastic on the big screen.

RELATED PROGRAMMING: STAGE TO SCREEN

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