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Vet­er­an poll­ster Dr Vish­nu Bis­ram of North Amer­i­can Caribbean Teach­ers As­so­ci­a­tion (NAC­TA ) has urged the pub­lic to view po­lit­i­cal sur­veys like the re­cent Hamid Ghany poll as snap­shots, not pre­dic­tions.

“Sev­er­al peo­ple asked me to com­ment on the Ghany poll,” he said, ref­er­enc­ing the April 20 Guardian pub­li­ca­tion. “But it’s not fair or pro­fes­sion­al for one poll­ster to cri­tique an­oth­er’s work. In­stead, I’ll speak to how polls are gen­er­al­ly done.”

Dr Bis­ram, who has con­duct­ed hun­dreds of sur­veys in Trinidad, To­ba­go, and abroad, said crit­i­cism of the Ghany poll’s sam­ple size and eth­nic break­down is large­ly un­found­ed. “He sur­veyed 1,650 peo­ple in Trinidad and 550 in To­ba­go—well above the stan­dard thresh­old. And each of the 11 con­stituen­cies sur­veyed has dif­fer­ent de­mo­graph­ics. One size doesn’t fit all.”