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…
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…
With all our excitement over the last few months about the accuracy of online polling during the election season—substantially outperforming “gold standard” telephone research—there was not time to share ESOMAR’s September 2012 updated guide to purchasing online sample. The guide consists of 28 questions all purveyors of online sample should answer, publish, and make available…
If there is one super important lesson to be learned from this year’s round of election polling, it is that online surveys work. Google Consumer Surveys, which use non-probability online samples, predicted the election far better than Gallup did. And online surveys, overall, outperformed telephone surveys. The New York Times’ Nate Silver compiled polling results…
I have never been a media poll watcher or politics junkie who tracks every new poll saying which candidate is favored to win. It is hard to see the point of spending so much time and money predicting the outcome of an event that will be known with certainty within a matter of days, weeks,…
By elephants, we mean Republicans. Or maybe you have too many Democrats. Maybe it keeps going back and forth, which is the problem that Gallup sometimes has. In the spirit of learning all we can from election season polling, this week we focus on whom to include (or exclude) in your research, analysis, and market…
Six months ago Google launched an intriguing new way to conduct cost-effective surveys that offers an alternative to omnibus surveys. One or two easy survey questions are presented to online users as they seek access to high quality media sites. They gain free access in exchange for answering the survey questions. Google tracks how many…
During a presidential election year there is no escaping the flurry of public opinion polling and the intense scrutiny that surveys get from the media. But love it or hate it, there are excellent reasons to pay close attention to this year’s political polling.