The Abuse of Public Opinion Surveys and Health Legislation, Article Critique Example

Based on a case study of how public opinion surveys were utilized to shape health legislation with regard to tobacco, Perlstadt and Holmes critique the abuse of such survey methodology and the negative effects this has on legislation. In the case study in question, tobacco lobbyists influenced surveys in such a manner that the public opinion results ultimately resulted in health legislation reforms that were beneficial to the tobacco industry. Accordingly, not only was what in the authors’ view poor health legislation passed, an ethical violation occurred, in so far as special interest groups were able to manipulate legislation through a correlative manipulation of public opinion polls.

The authors therefore suggest that more attention must be made to public opinion survey methodology, so as to prevent similar incidents. In particular, the lack of rotation of public response lists and a biased presentation of information in the surveys themselves were cited by the authors as some of the methodological errors performed. The article thus presents a useful summary of how public opinion survey methodology should be employed with relation to questions of health legislation.

At the same time, the article could be improved upon by considering the very link between public opinion and health legislation in terms of the former shaping the latter. Namely, this relationship is problematic in two main senses. Firstly, health legislation should ideally be proposed by members of the health care community, since they are experts in the field. The general public, in other words, lacks the specialization to make significant changes to health legislation beyond issues related to patient treatment on a subjective level. Secondly, opening up the formulation of health legislation to the public sector can have the negative consequence of allowing special interests groups with particular agendas, such as the tobacco lobby in the article’s study, to shape policy.