Survey research firms face increasingly high non-completion rates. Analysis based on extra efforts to reach non-responders finds few differences between the responses of the easy- and hard-to-reach.
Summary of Findings The proportion of Americans who rely solely on a cell phone for their telephone service continues to grow, as does the share who still have a landline phone but do most of their calling on their cell phone. With these changes, there is an increased concern that polls conducted only on landline […]
Several factors deserve exploration, but one should not ignore the possibility of the longstanding pattern of pre-election polls overstating support for black candidates among white voters, particularly white voters who are poor.
From holiday distractions to winter weather, the people who will be measuring voters’ preferences in primaries and caucuses around the nation will be dealing with unprecedented problems. Here’s how they plan to do it.
A recent report, “Muslim Americans: Middle Class and Mostly Mainstream,” attracted a great deal of attention but also raised a number of questions about the research. Here are answers to some of the most frequently asked questions.
The number of cell-phone-only households has continued to grow — 12.8% of all households by the end of 2006, according to the National Health Interview Survey. While the noncoverage problem is currently not damaging estimates for the entire population, a study finds evidence that it does create biased estimates on certain variables for young adults, 25% of whom are cell-only.
The landline-less are different from regular telephone users in many of their opinions and their numbers are growing fast. Can survey researchers meet this challenge?
As the number of declared presidential candidates grows, followers of early poll readings should bear in mind some caveats. Early frontrunners for the Republican nomination in most of the past seven open contests have gone on to win the nomination, but this year there are two GOP frontrunners instead of one clear leader. On the Democratic side, even when there is a clear frontrunner as there is this year with Sen. Hillary Clinton, the early polls have been less reliable in predicting who will capture the nomination.
National elections are the high season for pollsters and with Election Day now less than two weeks away, new polls on the fight for Congress are being released nearly every day. Commonly, pollsters use something called the “generic ballot” to assess the state of the congressional race. Just how accurate is the “generic ballot” in predicting election results?
Political pollsters continue to cast a wary eye on the growing number of Americans who use only a cell phone and have no landline. The Pew Research Center estimates that this group now constitutes one-in-ten adults. But three Pew surveys of cell-only Americans this year have found that their absence from landline surveys is not creating a measurable bias in the bottom-line findings.