'; ?> Queensland election preview on ABC radio | What The People Want
Queensland election preview on ABC radio
Saturday, 21 January 2012 08:46 | Written by Graham Young

Steve's been a big supporter over the years of our polling, and his support, along with that of Andrew Carroll and Madonna King is one of the reasons I get my largest number of responses from Queensland. You can download the audio by clicking here.

In the interview I mention the beginnings of this online research project, which has now been going for over 10 years.

It originally started as a joint effort  by Mike Kaiser and me. We had effectively run the Labor and Liberal respectively state election campaigns  in 1995 but were for different reasons pursuing part-time careers as political commentators. Having run campaigns we knew that quantitative research didn't tell you much about what was really happening in an election apart from who was winning at a point in time.

Quantitative polling certainly tells you little about voter motivation, it's the qualitative, which is much less precise, but more revealing, which gives you insight into why the quants look like they do.

Neither of us wanted to be blowhards like many commentators, recycling gossip picked up from inside sources and friends - we wanted access to qual, but couldn't work out how to get it.

Then I read a book by Fiona Stewart and Chris Mann about using the Internet for research where they talked about online focus groups. We realised we could afford some of them.

So Mike and I used the email list I had for On Line Opinion (then only 2 years old) and recruited people to talk to us in online chat rooms. Our first effort involved Professor John Wanna, and if I remember correctly Anne Delaney (then an ABC journalist) sat in on our first session as well.

This led to Mike and me regularly appearing on Andrew Carroll's morning breakfast program, a relationship which still continues as you can see from yesterday morning's interview.

The focus groups eventually morphed into my online surveys which were originally just a device to select prospects. This was made possible to a large extent by the use of Leximancer - computerised semantic software developed in Brisbane which allows you to easily analyse large amounts of data.

Share this article on your favourite social bookmarking sites:
Digg! Reddit! Del.icio.us! Google! Facebook! StumbleUpon! Twitter!