Trend Analysis explained!
Similarly, to yesterday’s explanation of the POLL of POLLS (PoPs), we will use some fictive polls to illustrate the trend analysis.
Yesterday’s articles explained the PoPs. For the trend analysis, we need to receive a few more polls from the same statistics companies or pollsters, spread out over a longer period of time, for the same district.
For example, let us assume that we have an additional two polls for Zahleh, taken over a period of two weeks:
Fictive poll 1 (with two sets of numbers, taken one week apart):
| Party name | Projected % 1st poll | Projected % 2nd poll, a week after | Trend |
| Future Movement | 22.1 | 20.1 | -2 |
| Hezbollah | 16.7 | 17.7 | +1 |
| FPM (Aoun) | 11.2 | 11.2 | 0 |
| Popular bloc (Skaff) | 10.5 | 9.5 | -1 |
| Lebanese Forces | 9.5 | 10.5 | +1 |
Fictive poll 2 (with two sets of numbers, taken one week apart):
| Party name | Projected % 1st poll | Projected % 2nd poll, a week after | Trend |
| Future Movement | 19.7 | 18 | -1.7 |
| Hezbollah | 18.9 | 20 | +1.1 |
| Lebanese Forces | 13.5 | 15 | +1.5 |
| FPM (Aoun) | 11.5 | 12.8 | +1.3 |
| Popular Bloc (Skaff) | 9.2 | 9 | -0.2 |
As you can see, the two polls have two different sets of numbers. Yet, in a trend analysis, voting percentage matter less than TREND! Ie how much this voting percentage changed over time.
In our fictive example, both polls had similar trends, and this allowed us to reach important conclusions. For example, Hezbollah popularity is rising with an average of 1% (we averaged the two trend numbers). While Aoun’s is slightly rising with only .65%, Meanwhile Future Movement is dropping with an average of -1.8%
For convenience sake, let’s assume another set of polls came out after another week (we will call it week 3), and we calculated the average and we got these results.
| Party name | Week 2 polls average | Week 3 polls average | Week 4 polls average |
| Future Movement | 19.7 | 18 | 22 |
| Hezbollah | 18.9 | 20 | 20 |
| Lebanese Forces | 13.5 | 15 | 16 |
| FPM (Aoun) | 11.5 | 12.8 | 14 |
| Popular Bloc (Skaff) | 9.2 | 9 | 7 |
The Magic Chart (work in progress):
In conclusion, if we use both tools PoPs and the Trend Analysis we can obtain a much clearer picture of the electoral race than using any other poll or numbers! This website will focus on these two tools and we will try to update our main trend analysis and PoPs charts, as often as the abundance of polls allows us.