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Showing posts from May 17, 2015

Rating the Performance of Politicians in Kenya: Why Pollsters Need to Style Up

It has become a common phenomenon, pollsters coming up with percentages and creating stories that have profound effects on the psyche of the nation. Social science research often involves collecting data in order to capture the views of individuals. However, social sciences distinguish themselves from common sense and pure rumor mongering because of adhering to scientific principles. Science as a way of knowing is unique because of effort exerted to ensure replicability of findings, objectivity, logical reasoning, purposefulness, empirical evidence, clearly defined methodology, systematic study process and ethical consideration throughout the inquiry process. For any research to be worthy of the scientific label, it has to be thoroughly and systematically thought through in such a manner that others doing a similar study can get similar results subject to a given margin of error. Pollsters in Kenya continue to baffle me; they failed in getting presidential polls right but that