The Pack Poll, a student-led organization, has surveyed students on many different key issues during the cycle of the 2016 election. With today being Election Day, they have shared some thoughts on the information they have found throughout the election cycle in regards to what students at NC State think.
Ryan Proctor, assistant researcher at The Pack Poll and a senior studying political science, laid out the foundation of what the group seeks to learn.
“Everybody has these inclinations about the way things are, the way things aren’t, how people think, what people think, why people think that way,” Proctor said. “Sometimes you’re right, sometimes you’re wrong, but a lot of what we do at Pack Poll is put numbers to these ideas.”
The Pack Polls are normally sent out to a diverse set of NC State students picked out by the Office of Institutional Research, intent on finding the most diverse group to send out emails to so that the results accurately reflect what the majority of NC State Students believe.
For the gubernatorial race between incumbent Gov. Pat McCrory and Attorney General Roy Cooper, The Pack Poll surveyed students on how they felt about House Bill 2, a controversial topic among the state.
Matt Kubota, a senior studying graphic design and another assistant researcher at The Pack Poll, wrote a story about student opinions of HB2 and discussed some results he found.
“We measured students’ demographics, like their party identification and whether they think more liberally or conservatively,” Kubota said. “ … We found that the major factor that can predict whether or not a person supports HB2 is their party identification.”
The report found overwhelmingly that students who define themselves to be more liberal disagree with HB2 and students who are more conservative tend to agree with the bill. Overall, more students disagreed with the bill than agreed.
As for the national election, Proctor has said that the group has found trouble getting an accurate survey of how students really feel because many justify their choice with the phrase “the lesser of two evils.”
“There is a lot of talk about how Clinton and Trump are the most unfavorable candidates of either party, and we’ve had unfavorable candidates before,“ Proctor said. “Fairly rarely, but for both party’s candidates to be as unfavorable as they are is a little unprecedented, and we tried to dig into why people were feeling the way they were.”
The Pack Poll created word clouds where students could define each candidate in one word that overall described how they felt about them.
“The most popular response for Clinton was ‘liar,’ ‘criminal’ or ‘crook,’“ Proctor said. “And the most popular response for Trump was ‘arrogant,’ ‘liar,’ ‘loud,’ and both of them had ‘lesser of two evils.’”
All polls contain some sort of bias, so The Pack Poll tries to minimize its bias by following the example of major polling groups like Gallup, according to Proctor.
Kubota explained some of the methods that the organization uses when it deals with numbers and the polls to make sure that they don’t represent some bias and accurately represent the overall opinion of the student body.
“I think there is a misconception that we have a bias, one way or another, because if people are taking our surveys we might include questions that are different versions, that are given to different takers … so one version might lean one way, and another version might lean another way,” Kubota said.
Proctor elaborated that this means that because it is assumed the questions will have a form of bias in them naturally, it was easier to give different versions that were intentionally slightly bias to one side to get an overall better opinion from each side.
The Pack Poll will continue to survey students about key topics that may come up fairly soon, one poll expected soon will be based on the Zika virus and how students feel about what the U.S. government should do to prevent the virus from spreading in America.
