Week 5: Response to Skin-Deep Question 4

The Pew Research Center for the People and the Press is "an independent opinion research group that studies attitudes toward the press, politics and public policy issues". This organization does many different types of research and polling media and public policy that is in turn used by political leaders, journalists, scholars, and public interest organizations. This information is helpful in this age of a changing American society because it can give us a good look into what different types of Americans are thinking about different issues. The non partisan nature of the surveys is particularly helpful in finding real facts and figures from their data as well. The polls that they conduct cover every area of current news and topics and in turn shape many areas of current news. News media often relies on statistics in order to make a compelling argument, present a dry idea with a little bit more persuasive data or to liven up a dead story with numbers. The source of this data being a strong and reliable one is mandatory. A data collection organization like the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press is just the kind of organization that is able to spend the money to come up with this sort of data. The data collected on specific race related or sensitive topics is polled amongst a larger population, but is over-sampled from a smaller specific population. This is the harder to do more expensive method of surveying that is mentioned in the article by David Bositis.