Skin-Deep: What Polls of Minorities Miss

The media’s knowledge of African Americans, Asians and Latinos is woefully lacking. Opinion polls break out minority-group results from general populations, but the meaningfulness of the findings is moot at best. Lacking reliable data on the variable and textured hopes, needs and fears of minority communities, the media instead turn to personal anecdotes and self-appointed spokespeople to gauge community sentiments. That can be terribly misleading -- and risky -- when reporting on crime, police misconduct and elections. It’s no surprise that racial and ethnic tensions and misunderstanding endure in cities such as Los Angeles.

When it comes to polls, news organizations have apparently decided that their typical reader or viewer is most interested in studies of a general population, be it a city, state or the nation. Polling is expensive, of course, and polling subpopulations even more so.

But there’s a price to be paid for not regularly polling minority communities. The quality of the information in minority-group breakouts is inferior because the small sample sizes have large margins of error. As a result, not much can be reliably said about the differences between black men and women, or Latino young adults and seniors. Such ignorance has serious policy implications.

The standard margin of error in general population surveys is plus or minus 3 percentage points, at a confidence level of 95%. Media pollsters achieve this low margin of error by randomly interviewing a sufficient number of respondents.

Consider The Times’ March 7 poll on the mayor’s race. To obtain a 3-percentage-point margin of error, 1,113 Angelenos were polled. The margin of error for the poll’s subgroup of 257 African Americans was 6 percentage points. To achieve that, 134 blacks in addition to the 123 in the general sample were interviewed. If The Times had not obtained that additional sample, the margin of error for blacks in its survey would have been about plus or minus 9 percentage points.

The higher standard was costly. Polling minority communities is more expensive per interview than for the general population, for a number of reasons. Because they make up a smaller proportion of the population, minority group members are harder to reach. Potential interviewees must determine who’s suitable for the sample, which adds to the number of calls (a significant cost factor).

When surveying respondents for whom English is not their first language, interview protocols must be translated, and respondents questioned by interviewers fluent in their language. Also, it’s best to match the interviewers’ race with that of the polled community.

In the most recent national survey conducted by the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, the cost of a completed interview for its black sample was 47% higher than one for the general population.

But polling minority communities is important not only because their views often contrast with those of whites -- and one another. It’s also important because fundamental demographic differences frequently mask the significance of divergent attitudes within minority groups. The African American (median age 31) and Latino (26.7) populations are much younger than their non-Hispanic white counterpart (39.7), which is one reason Republicans have tried to draw young blacks into the Social Security debate.

Gender differences between communities are also significant. Black adult women represent 55.8% of all black adults in the nation -- outnumbering black men by 2.55 million, or 26%, according to a 2002 census survey. In contrast, there are 4.4% more Hispanic adult men than women, while white adult women outnumber their male counterparts by 8%.

When The Times said it had weighted its March 7 poll results according to sex and age, did its samples of blacks and Latinos correspond to these groups’ different demographics? Even presuming they did, how many individual respondents represented the views of, say, young unmarried black women?

Although the media have not made much effort to reliably capture the range of views in minority communities, other organizations have filled the vacuum in recent years. These include surveys of minority group opinions by Harvard, the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press and the Tomas Rivera Institute. The results have not gone unnoticed.

For instance, based on work at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, generational differences in attitudes among African Americans are a hot topic, leading to talk about increased levels of black political independence, black support for education alternatives such as vouchers, partial privatization of Social Security and the significance of Christian conservatism to black politics.

Important as these efforts are, they are national in scope. What’s also needed is for other organizations, including news operations, to take this effort to the local level, where people of all racial and ethnic groups live and work in proximity and need to understand the views they do and do not share.