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tecoyah,
your polls were interesting. Without doing a validity check on them, however, they don't indicate anything significant.
How do you know they asked the same question? I mean, that's your point: that they asked the same question, worded differently, which resulted in different responses for the same question.
Most polls and statistical tools utilize multiple questions, asked in various ways, in order to ascertain a particular theme. For example, it's likely that all three of your questions would be on a poll and then the data analyzed to see what people were really answering. Of course, they wouldn't even be used until they had been checked for validity.
The linguistics student does have a point, however, in that studying language can give deeper insight and the way things are worded should be suspect. But I don't know of any university educated people (during which time students must complete some statistical courses) who believe that polls or statistical data are outright nonsense.
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"The theory of a free press is that truth will emerge from free discussion, not that it will be presented perfectly and instantly in any one account." -- Walter Lippmann
"You measure democracy by the freedom it gives its dissidents, not the freedom it gives its assimilated conformists." -- Abbie Hoffman
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