- Originally published in the Los Angeles Times March 13, 2005
Copyright 2005 Los Angeles Times
By: David Bositis, David
Bositis is senior political analyst at the Joint Center for Political
and Economic Studies, a Washington-based research organization
specializing in African American issues.
The media's knowledge of African Americans,
Asians and Latinos is woefully lacking. Opinion polls break out
minority-group results from general populations, but the meaningfulness
of the findings is moot at best. Lacking reliable data on the variable
and textured hopes, needs and fears of minority communities, the media
instead turn to personal anecdotes and self-appointed spokespeople to
gauge community sentiments. That can be terribly misleading -- and
risky -- when reporting on crime, police misconduct and elections. It's
no surprise that racial and ethnic tensions and misunderstanding endure in cities such as Los Angeles.
When
it comes to polls, news organizations have apparently decided that
their typical reader or viewer is most interested in studies of a
general population, be it a city, state or the nation. Polling is
expensive, of course, and polling subpopulations even more so.
But
there's a price to be paid for not regularly polling minority
communities. The quality of the information in minority-group breakouts
is inferior because the small sample sizes have large margins of error.
As a result, not much can be reliably said about the differences
between black men and women, or Latino young adults and seniors. Such ignorance has serious policy implications.
The
standard margin of error in general population surveys is plus or minus
3 percentage points, at a confidence level of 95%. Media pollsters
achieve this low margin of error by randomly interviewing a sufficient
number of respondents.
Consider The Times'
March 7 poll on the mayor's race. To obtain a 3-percentage-point margin
of error, 1,113 Angelenos were polled. The margin of error for the
poll's subgroup of 257 African Americans was 6
percentage points. To achieve that, 134 blacks in addition to the 123
in the general sample were interviewed. If The Times had not obtained
that additional sample, the margin of error for blacks in its survey
would have been about plus or minus 9 percentage points.
The
higher standard was costly. Polling minority communities is more
expensive per interview than for the general population, for a number
of reasons. Because they make up a smaller proportion of the
population, minority group members are harder to reach. Potential
interviewees must determine who's suitable for the sample, which adds
to the number of calls (a significant cost factor).
When
surveying respondents for whom English is not their first language,
interview protocols must be translated, and respondents questioned by
interviewers fluent in their language. Also, it's best to match the
interviewers' race with that of the polled community.
In
the most recent national survey conducted by the Joint Center for
Political and Economic Studies, the cost of a completed interview for
its black sample was 47% higher than one for the general population.
But
polling minority communities is important not only because their views
often contrast with those of whites -- and one another. It's also
important because fundamental demographic differences frequently mask
the significance of divergent attitudes within minority groups. The African American
(median age 31) and Latino (26.7) populations are much younger than
their non-Hispanic white counterpart (39.7), which is one reason
Republicans have tried to draw young blacks into the Social Security
debate.
Gender differences between
communities are also significant. Black adult women represent 55.8% of
all black adults in the nation -- outnumbering black men
by 2.55 million, or 26%, according to a 2002 census survey. In
contrast, there are 4.4% more Hispanic adult men than women, while
white adult women outnumber their male counterparts by 8%.
When
The Times said it had weighted its March 7 poll results according to
sex and age, did its samples of blacks and Latinos correspond to these
groups' different demographics? Even presuming they did, how many
individual respondents represented the views of, say, young unmarried black women?
Although
the media have not made much effort to reliably capture the range of
views in minority communities, other organizations have filled the
vacuum in recent years. These include surveys of minority group
opinions by Harvard, the Pew Research Center for the People and the
Press and the Tomas Rivera Institute. The results have not gone
unnoticed.
For instance, based on work at the Joint Center for Political and
Economic Studies, generational differences in attitudes among African
Americans
are a hot topic, leading to talk about increased levels of black
political independence, black support for education alternatives such
as vouchers, partial privatization of Social Security and the
significance of Christian conservatism to black politics.
Important
as these efforts are, they are national in scope. What's also needed is
for other organizations, including news operations, to take this effort
to the local level, where people of all racial and ethnic groups live
and work in proximity and need to understand the views they do and do
not share.