Leading practitioners of survey research now agree that online polling and other forms of non-probability sampling can work. The key is to give careful attention to the survey protocols, data collection, cleaning, and back-end weighting so that ultimately the sample being analyzed matches the population you want to know about in as many relevant ways…
Question order in surveys matters a lot more than most of us realize, which makes it critical to assess what you most want to know before your survey respondents are influenced (or, in the language or survey experts, “primed”) by additional questions on the topic. Here is a superb example from last fall’s political polling…
We ran this script of a Christmas Eve phone survey interview two years ago. It’s time to bring it out again! It’s an amusing and oh-too-true parody of how market research pollsters ask questions in clear, precise, linear ways to gather data we need for analysis. Although it takes the form of a phone interview…
The Associated Press (AP) announced last month it is moving all of its public opinion polling from phone surveys to online surveys. This is progress, because over the last decade AP has been one of a handful of media holdouts (along with ABC News and The New York Times) who have insisted that only phone-based…
The purists in the polling industry who have always insisted that only probability sampling is valid may finally be accepting that their methods are dead. This is one happy conclusion I draw from the debate over AAPOR’s recent task force report on non-probability sampling, which is nicely summarized (and debated) as the lead article of…
The next time you field an online survey, take a look at the metadata, which will tell you the operating systems respondents are using and the devices on which they are completing the survey. You may be surprised. In our most recent general population survey, which included adults in a two-county region of a “non-tech”…
Every year the Census Bureau comes under attack from elected officials who unfortunately know little about how immensely valuable its services are. The Census accounts for a miniscule slice of the total U.S. budget, and yet it provides some of the most essential services that bolster good government, political stability, and economic growth. These are…
Even if you don’t care about political polling, or the fact that Gallup consistently overestimates support for Republican candidates, it is worth paying attention to how Gallup is trying to fix its problems with surveys and polling. They are not happy with how poorly their polls have fared (who would be?), and they have teams…
It is hard to find an appropriate use for Google Surveys, because, as we outlined in a review article last fall, its capabilities are limited. But last week we needed a quick incidence test of how many U.S. adults own a certain type of investment product. Google Surveys seemed perfect. It was not fast, by…
After leaving academic research for the world of applied research, I found myself doing a lot of surveys for public relations. These surveys are designed to uncover surprising or newsworthy nuggets of data that companies use to focus attention on topics relevant to their concerns. My first boss despised such work, believing that a public…