Is it possible to make a poll thread with adequate options?

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a poll thread here that hadn’t worked out several ways to make the poll better within the first eight replies or so.

I guess the best way to create a poll would be to first post a pre-poll poll polling people about what they’d like to see as options in a poll.

Poll.

You left out “Possibly”

FAIL

You should have allowed us to see who voted for what.

What about Pretty Sure, Not so Sure, definitely not and absolutely?

Sheesh!

My polls are always awesome. Maybe you just suck?

While some polls do leave out obvious options, I think most of the time it’s just anal idiots who refuse to accept that one of the options actually covers their view. Then you have the “shit-bonerz” idiots.

Surprisingly, not everyone cares about every poll. Not including the people who don’t care further distorts the already distorted convenience sampling that we’ve got going on here.

Just like you’d include non-smokers in a study on smokers, you need to include shitbonerz to get a better idea of just how niche your poll is.

Also, for examples of how to screw up a poll, look at any poll by Jake Plane.

An example of a poll in which Shit Bonerz is an important metric

Notice that he still hasn’t come back.

I don’t know, I just kind of assume that if you aren’t interested in a poll or thread you should just not post in it. If a poll is truly pointless, the lack of responses makes it pretty clear to the poster that it was not a topic anyone cared about.

It depends on the poll, however. If you are using a poll to get a gauge on how people are going to vote, for example, you poll likely voters. Having an option that says XX% aren’t going to vote is pointless.

A major way of checking skew is by seeing how many people don’t really give a shit. That’s why all major publications report Yes/No/Don’t Care when they do surveys. Check an opinion poll in one of your magazines right now and see if I’m right. Go ahead, I’ll wait.

If you don’t check the Do Not Care population, you end up with results that can’t be generalized to the population at large. For instance, lets say you polled people and offered them two choices: Dem or Rep. Half picked Dem, half picked Rep. From that, you’d generalize (incorrectly) that there was a 50/50 split. Let’s say you did the poll again, but this time with three choices: Dem/Rep/Shitbonerz. This time you might find, well, anything. It could be that there is still a 50/50 split between Dem/Rep, it could be that the even proportions have remained but an equal number from both has gone SB (so 30 Rep 30 Dem 40 Shitbonerz), or it could just be that the proportions are totally different (20 Dem 30 Rep 50 Shitbonerz).

Hopefully that explains things a bit better.

See, polls work when done correctly!

Not really. The argument seems to be that Shitbonerz is necessary so that people who don’t care can still vote. Which is pointless in some polls. Again, look at my election polling example: If you have a poll of likely voters, you don’t need an option for people who aren’t going to vote to say so. That’s the shitbonerz option right there.

Let’s say you are polling to see how likely voters are going to vote on a school bond levy. The options of “Yes,” “No,” and “Not sure” cover it completely.