Evaluate two articles on voter turn out. Articles will be uploaded - Essay Example

s has been decreasing as well such that in the mid sixties 2.4 out of every 1,000 women over the age of 20 belonged to the League of Women Voters while this ratio decreased to 0.79 per 1,000 in 1988 (p. 653). Overall, this indicates that interest in the political process is decreasing with decreasing voter turnout since the sixties being a symptom of this phenomenon. The study in question attempts to gauge the effects of personal canvassing, telephone calls and direct mail on voter turnout while improving on gaps in previous research on the issue.

It has been indicated that previous research on the issue is not credible because the sample sizes used were too small to provide strong generalizations. Previous research had sample sizes of between 200 and 500 respondents resulting in confidence levels of 95% with a variation of twenty percentage points (p. 654). In contrast, the current research has a sample size that is at least 100 times as large as previous research and excludes students because they are used for personal canvassing in this research (p. 655). The study is based on three types of intervention namely personal canvassing, telephone calls and direct mail that the researchers have labeled as treatments.

The total size of the sample size was some 29,380 people selected at random from various neighborhoods around the city. The control groups were not provided any treatment at all while certain groups were provided one or more treatments (p. 655). Certain people demarcated for treatment who could not be reached (such as through phone calls) were shifted over into the control group because they met the criteria of the control group better than that of treatment. This shift of data tends to give this study a more realistic picture of intervention because previous studies have largely failed to accommodate such changes (p. 654). However, in assigning certain groups more than one treatment the research has moved into multivariate analysis that could not be