The problem with many opinion polls, including the City of Prince George's current survey on the live entertainment preferences of local residents, is they ask respondents to predict their own future behaviour.
Even though polls undertaken during election periods ask the respondents how they would vote if they were casting their ballot that day, it's an irrelevant question since it can't account for the variables that could change the mind of voters.
At least those polls are within a matter of days or weeks before the vote, so there can be at least some margin of reliability. The current survey the city is doing is much worse, since it's asking 450 local residents to remember what live entertainment events they attended in the past year and then to guess which kind of live events they would go to in the next year and how much they'd be willing to pay.
The 10-minute survey then goes further and ask questions to gauge the support for locally-produced live entertainment, as opposed to tour stops from national and international artists. When they called me on Wednesday night, I told them that I was willing to pay between $25 and $40 three times per year to see locally-produced live entertainment but I would entertain paying anywhere from $80 to $120 twice per year for a ticket to see a big-name artist.
I also told them I'd only pay that for a rock show since I can't stand country. In hindsight, I'd like to change my answer and include techno. If Deadmau5 or Daft Punk announced a Prince George tour stop, I'd certainly pay $120 for that.
Second-guessing my responses after I hung up the phone proves my point about the validity and reliability of this survey. There's a big difference between asking someone if they'd pay $120 to see a big-name rock legend or if they'd pay $120 to see the Eagles. The first response is maybe, the second response is more specific because the question is more specific. You like the Eagles enough to pay $120 for a ticket, you don't like the Eagles, you like the Eagles but not enough to cough up $120.
The city's poll is also saddled with the unreliability of past behaviour predicting future action. When asked, I initially said I didn't see any live dance productions in the past 12 months and then I suddenly remembered going to see The Nutcracker in December. That was the first ballet I had seen in more than 20 years (at least that I remember) so that's hardly an indicator that I'm partial to ballet but that will be the interpretation pulled out of my response.
It's hard to see how this survey's vague questions, with no mention ever made at all about the performing arts centre, are going to provide any meaningful data that will "help refine assumptions around the right sizing of the PAC," as city manager Beth James explained it to city council this week.
But let's pretend the questions were perfect and the answers were solid and meaningful.
Even then, the numbers could still be wrong. The Citizen and CKPG commissioned a poll during the 2013 provincial election of 300 respondents each in Prince George-Valemount and Prince George Mackenzie. Asked four weeks before voting day, the poll reported that Shirley Bond had 46 per cent of the support of decided voters and her NDP opponent 41 per cent, while Mike Morris enjoyed 44 per cent support and Bobby Deepak had 37 per cent. In both ridings, 19 per cent of the respondents said they were undecided.
The accuracy of the poll was plus or minus 5.6 per cent, 19 times out of 20. If we had polled 450 respondents as the city is doing, our plus-minus ratio would have been 4.6 per cent.
Anyhow, when the dust cleared on election night, both Bond and Morris had scooped up most or all of the undecided voters and Ogasawara and Deepak's support had dropped several percentage points.
Looking at it that way, our poll was accurate in both ridings within the margin of error but that's an optimistic interpretation. The other way to look at it is that our poll was almost as out to lunch as the provincial polls that were calling for an NDP majority right up to election day.
The nice thing about elections is that pollsters and the media organizations that hire them get to find out how reliable the surveys were. There will be no way of finding out how good the numbers from this poll will be, even after the results are released in June.
A poll built on a shaky premise asking vague questions with no way of testing the validity of the results adds up to a waste of $20,000 of city tax dollars.
