Week 12 Quiz

A town council member reads a random-sample poll showing most residents oppose a new bus depot, but votes for the depot on their own judgment of the town's interest. Which view of representation does that vote follow?

Select one.

• The delegate view, which follows the represented as the poll shows
• An agenda-setting view, which follows what the news covers most
• The trustee view, which follows the member's own judgment
• A random-sample view, which follows whoever was chosen by chance

Dining services draws 400 students at random from the full enrollment list and also posts a click poll on its app that 2,000 users answer (both illustrative). Which poll can carry a margin of error, and why?

Select one.

• The random sample, since every student had a known chance
• The click poll, because 2,000 answers are five times as many as 400
• Both polls, because each one asked students the same question
• Neither poll, because no sample smaller than the full student body works

Using this course's approximation of about one over the square root of the sample size, at the 95 percent level, what is the approximate margin of error for a simple random sample of 1,000 people?

Select one.

• About 1 percentage point
• About 3 percentage points
• About 5 percentage points
• About 10 percentage points

Which list names the four facts a trustworthy poll always reports?

Select one.

• The headline share, the sponsor, the topic, and the response count
• The sample size, the topic, the sponsor, and the headline share
• The question wording, the headline share, the topic, and the sponsor
• The sample size, the field dates, the sampling method, and the stated margin

A poll reports a stated margin of error of plus or minus 3 percentage points. A classmate says this means the poll is accurate to within 3 percent. What is the best correction?

Select one.

• The poll is accurate to within 3 percentage points rather than 3 percent
• The margin applies only to polls larger than 1,000 people
• It covers sampling error only, not wording or non-response
• The margin means 3 of every 100 answers in the poll were wrong

Doubling the size of a random sample removes the bias created by a leading question.

True or false.

• True
• False

Pew Research Center's Americans and AI 2026 survey of 5,119 U.S. adults states a margin of plus or minus 1.6 percentage points, while the course's approximation gives about 1.4 for that sample size. Which figure should a careful reader cite as the poll's margin?

Select one.

• The pollster's stated margin, reflecting weighting and design
• The course approximation, since it comes from the sample size
• An average of the two, since both describe one survey
• Neither, since a sample this large needs no margin

Which of these are agents of political socialization, the sources that shape a person's political attitudes? Select all that apply.

Select every option that applies.

• Family
• School
• Peers and life events
• The media
• A poll's stated margin of error
• A poll's field dates

Turnout tends to rise with education. What does that documented pattern show by itself?

Select one.

• That schooling causes people to vote
• That education and turnout tend to rise together, a correlation
• That turnout ought to be raised by more schooling
• That people with less schooling cannot be sampled

Every local news site covers a broken bridge for a week, and residents start naming the bridge as the town's most important problem while still disagreeing about who is to blame. Which media effect does this illustrate?

Select one.

• Framing, because the coverage told residents who to blame
• An echo chamber, because residents met only views matching their own
• Self-selection, because residents chose which stories to read
• Agenda-setting, because coverage shaped what residents think about