Sociologists urged mass media to verify sources of information

The Sociologist association of Ukraine appealed to mass media asking to respect thoroughly requirements of making public the data of sociological polls and to verify the competency of any source of information, as to the open letter published on its web-site. The professional association is concerned with the fact that on the Eve of presidential election there are more and more of false and non-professional sociological polls data. “The mass media outlets publish these data referring to some unknown or little-known centers without an obligatory methodologist information necessarily to assess the quality of the data. Sometimes, some serious mass media and prominent TV channels come out with the polls of 20 thousands of respondents held in one day and they fail to provide any information on the mode of selection of the respondents, nor the method of gathering the information”. Often such centers organize the press conferences making public the conclusions of such pseudo-surveys. “Often, such centers do not dispose any web-site, or if they have it, no information on previous surveys made by them is published on it, or information on its staff or its director is on the web-site, no contact information. All this has provoked an inflation of professional sociological information and does not allow the public to discern measures of public opinion really existing and its imitation”, as to the sociologists’ letter.