| Sumario: | The articles focuses on lessons learned by British pollsters about the conduct of opinion polls during the 1992 British General Election. The British have along history of election polling, a system of national print and broadcast media and an interested and literate audience in the British public. The record of the British polls is a good one. The most recent British General election was an exception when the polls go wrong. Opinion polls are an expensive form of journalism, yet nearly every national and Scottish newspaper in Britain sponsors its own poll at election times. All newspapers report all the others' polls as do the television news programs. The polls in the 1992 British General Election, however, have a lot to answer for. While the five major pollsters, Gallup, Harris, ICM, MORI and NOP, averaged a 1.3 percent Labor lead, the final result was a 7.6 percent lead for the Conservatives. The polls backed the wrong winner, by a wider margin than can be accounted for by sampling error, and were widely criticized for their inability to perform expectation. One of the most popular reactions to the polls' failure in 1992 was to blame sample size, but it is manifestly apparent that sample size is not the key to quality of findings.
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