It is called poll to the set of questions specially designed and thought to be directed to a sample of the population, which is considered by certain functional circumstances at work, representative of that population, with the aim of knowing the opinion of the people on certain current issues and why not also to measure people's temperature about a specific event that happens in a community determined and that arouses special attention among public opinion and that capable requires conducting a survey to learn more about the feeling of the people and thus proceed.
In the latter case, we can include those polls that the politicians themselves send to know the opinions, good or bad, that people have about them, more than anything in those times when the vote of an election runs them.
This type of survey that I mentioned in the previous paragraph is called sample survey, that is, a part is taken that is considered representative of the total population, a frame of reference should be taken for this, generally, a population census is the one that acts as a frame.
On the other hand, another of the types of polls most in vogue in recent years and that have also become the stars of the executive or legislative elections that are held in any nation, are the so-called opinion polls, which unlike sample surveys, takes a smaller portion of the population, so the results will not be as faithful or reliable.
Meanwhile, among the many other uses that can be given to them are: measuring the relationships between demographic, economic and social variables, evaluating demographic statistics as errors, omissions or inaccuracies, knowing more in depth some demographic variables with factors associated such as fertility or migration, determining factors when raising or lowering the numbers of a population, providing supplementary information that accompanies that obtained by censuses, periodically evaluating the results achieved by a program that was implemented recently or the evaluation of the scope that a method may have before being applied en masse to the population.
A separate paragraph deserves the uses of the surveys that the electronic media have been doing for some years, that is, for example, the online versions of the various newspapers in a country, which use the survey method a lot, generally, proposing some response options, to know the opinion of its readers about certain events and why not also generating a climate that may be able to distort the position of the person who governs the latter, because of what his newspaper says or maintains.
