The Particular Challenges of Polling Hispanics

*You know that feeling, when people are talking about you and you’re in the room? Here’s yet another main stream media article about polling Latinos, Latino attitudes, how best to reach Latinos … written by, apparently, a non-Latina. Why don’t they “get”us? Because they don’t get us, to write about ourselves. VL

By Allison Kpoicki, The New York Times

One of the thorniest issues in polling today is how to capture an accurate picture of the opinions of Latinos.

Traditional telephone surveys have obvious limitations. Nearly 3 in 20 Hispanics in the United States do not speak English well, creating the need for Spanish-speaking interviewers and translators, and not all polling firms employ them. also, 74 percent of Hispanics were not reachable by landline in 2012, compared with 30 percent of non-Hispanic white adults who lived in cellphone only households, according to the Pew Research Center’s 2012 National Survey of Latinos. Reaching an accurate sample of people by cellphone is tricky because area codes are not always tied to actual places of residence, and respondents need to be called back if they’re driving or at work.

Click HERE to read the full story.

[Photo by Jon Pinder/Flickr]