How we keep our online surveys from running too long
While there is no magic length that an online survey should be, Pew Research Center caps the length of its online American Trends Panel surveys at 15 minutes.
Numbers, Facts and Trends Shaping Your World
Nick Hatley
Former Research Analyst
Nick Hatley is a former research analyst focusing on survey methology.
Publications
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short reads
Does public opinion polling about issues still work?
National polls like the Center’s come within a few percentage points, on average, of benchmarks from high response rate federal surveys.
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short reads
Polls on COVID-19 vaccination closely align with CDC data
Public polling estimates on COVID-19 vaccination have been within about 2.8 points, on average, of the CDC’s calculated rate.
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Measuring the Risks of Panel Conditioning in Survey Research
A new evaluation of the Center’s national American Trends Panel finds little evidence that panel estimates are affected by errors associated with panel conditioning, a phenomenon that occurs when survey participation changes respondents’ true or reported behavior over time.
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Confronting 2016 and 2020 Polling Limitations
Looking at final estimates of the outcome of the 2020 U.S. presidential race, 93% of national polls overstated the Democratic candidate’s support among voters, while nearly as many (88%) did so in 2016.
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What 2020’s Election Poll Errors Tell Us About the Accuracy of Issue Polling
Given the errors in 2016 and 2020 election polling, how much should we trust polls that attempt to measure opinions on issues?
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A Resource for State Preelection Polling
If a battleground state poll does not adjust for having too many college graduates, it is at risk of overstating support for a Democratic presidential candidate. The Current Population Survey provides high-quality data that can mitigate overrepresentation of college graduates.
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Assessing the Risks to Online Polls From Bogus Respondents
While the growth of online interviewing is a prominent trend in polling, there is variation within that trend in how researchers recruit respondents. This study finds that sourcing affects data quality.
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Using tidyverse tools with Pew Research Center survey data in R
I wrote an introductory blog post about how to access and analyze Pew Research Center survey data with R, a free, open-source software for statistical analysis. The post showed how to perform tasks using the survey package.
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How to analyze Pew Research Center survey data in R
Pew Research Center releases its survey data publicly as IBM SPSS files with the .sav extension. But if you don’t have access to SPSS, there are free, open-source tools available to analyze and make use of the data.
