NEW YORK, May 13, 2013 /PRNewswire via COMTEX/ — Even though most media polls report that nearly everyone has an opinion on immigration, a new iMediaEthics poll has found that about a third of the public doesn’t have any position at all.

Because most polls don’t offer respondents the chance to admit they don’t have an opinion or don’t know about the issue, poll results end up skewed.

By giving respondents an explicit “don’t know” option, and by measuring intensity of opinion, the iMediaEthics poll is able to reveal a more realistic representation of the public’s views and compare those findings with what other polls claim.

David W. Moore, a former Gallup pollster who analyzes media polls for iMediaEthics, details the results in his article, New iMediaEthics PollCheck: Public More Laid Back on Immigration Reform Than What Most Polls Show.

iMediaEthics’ immigration poll is the sixth poll in the PollCheck program. Previous polls have studied gun control, same-sex marriage, and bike lanes.

Moore fact checks major media polls through PollCheck and analyzes media polls for iMediaEthics throughhis weekly blog PollTalk.

Sponsored by the Golkin Foundation, the poll was conducted by SurveyUSA on April 13 through April 16, among 896 adults across the country. (Read more on the methodology of the poll.)

David W. Moore is a Senior Fellow with the Carsey Institute at the University of New Hampshire. He is a former Vice President of the Gallup Organization and was a senior editor with the Gallup Poll for thirteen years. He is author of The Opinion Makers: An Insider Exposes the Truth Behind the Polls (Beacon, 2008; trade paperback edition, 2009).

iMediaEthics is published by Art Science Research Laboratory, a not-for-profit co-founded by its director,Rhonda Roland Shearer, an adjunct lecturer at the School of Journalism and Mass Communication, University of Iowa, and her late husband, Harvard professor and scientist Stephen Jay Gould. iMediaEthics, formerly known as StinkyJournalism.org, has a non-partisan journalism ethics program in which students and young journalists work with professional researchers to promote the media’s use of scientific methods and experts before publication.

SOURCE iMediaEthics