On the sanctity of polling

An interesting* thing happened to me in the theater this weekend: while waiting to see Forgetting Sarah Marshall, I was asked by some Nielsen pollsters if I wouldn’t mind giving them my opinion on a new trailer.** Being full of opinions, I was thrilled to say yes.

“How old are you?” my new pollster-friend asked.

“Um, 25,” I replied, doing some quick math in my head (“Let’s see…May 2008, minus July 1982…okay, 25, that’s right”)

“Huh,” he said, frowning. “Well, for the purpose of the polling, is it okay if I say you’re 24?”

“Yeah, I guess,” I replied, puzzled. I looked over at his clipboard and saw that the age groups were 18 (or possibly 16) to 24, 25 to 42 (or something like that, far older than me is the point), then higher up. In other words, he needed a 24 year old male, and I was a 25 year old male.

Now what, really, is the difference between me at 24 and me at 25? Not a great deal, I suppose. And I don’t really care that he’s massaging his data to get his work done. No biggie to me. But doesn’t this kind of corrupt the results? Especially since, I’m sure, he’s doing it more than once? And furthermore, what’s the cutoff? If I had been 26 would he still have knocked me down into the 18/16-24 category? If I was 21 would he ask if it’s okay to list me as 25? What, really, is the difference between a 39 year old and a 45 year old? If we can’t trust the sanctity of our market-research, what can we trust?

*At the risk of being accused of navel-gazing, I guess I should add “interesting to me, at least.”

**The trailer I watched was for How to Lose Friends and Alienate People. It looks all right. If I don’t see it at a critics’ screening I’ll wait for it to come out on DVD. And since I rarely see new DVDs, that means I’ll wait for it to come out on HBO.