Public Opinion Polling Basics
By the end of our free, five-lesson course, you will know why we have polls, what the different kinds of polls are, how polling works and what you should look for in a poll.
By the end of our free, five-lesson course, you will know why we have polls, what the different kinds of polls are, how polling works and what you should look for in a poll.
As a shop that studies human behavior through surveys and other social scientific techniques, we have a good line of sight into the contradictory nature of human preferences. Here’s a look at how we categorize our survey participants in ways that enhance our understanding of how people think and behave.
In 2020, Pew Research Center launched a new project called the National Public Opinion Reference Survey (NPORS). NPORS is an annual, cross-sectional survey of U.S. adults. Respondents can answer either by paper or online, and they are selected using address-based sampling from the United States Postal Service’s computerized delivery sequence file.
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In this short video, Pew Research Center researchers explain how they overcame these obstacles to produce the Center’s wide-ranging new survey of 1,001 American Muslims.
Telephone polls still provide accurate data on a wide range of social, demographic and political variables, but some weaknesses persist.
The first video in Pew Research Center’s Methods 101 series helps explain random sampling – a concept that lies at the heart of all probability-based survey research – and why it’s important.
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