Election Day Poll

On Tuesday November 2nd 2010 my Public Opinion class carried out an Election Day Poll that we had created in class. This was a really great experience to be a part of the political process and hand out the poll to varies people on campus. I gave 10 people the poll and our class had a total of 212 people take the poll which is great. In terms of my topic health care question 17 asked people their opinion about health care reform. The results were that 26 strong favored it, 62 favored it, 42 opposed it, 23 strongly opposed it, 31 had no opinion, and 27 were unsure. This just reminded me again that health care reform is such a split topic. Some else I noticed from the results was that when it came to the open ended questions most people left the space blank. We discussed in class that it is important to have open ended questions so that people don't feel like they are limited in their options, but what is the point if people are just going to leave it blank? How do you think you can create open ended questions that people actually answer? Is it just that people taking polls are just lazy or do they actually have no opinion? Let me know what you think.