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.
Numbers, Facts and Trends Shaping Your World
Survey Methods
Who Are You? The Art and Science of Measuring Identity
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.
How Pew Research Center Uses Its National Public Opinion Reference Survey (NPORS)
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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How can a survey of 1,000 people tell you what the whole U.S. thinks?
The first video in our “Methods 101” series is about random sampling, a concept that undergirds all probability-based survey research. Here’s how it works.
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Q&A: Political polls and the 2016 election
Courtney Kennedy of Pew Research Center, who chaired survey researchers organization AAPOR’s task force on political polling in the 2016 U.S. elections, discuss the group’s findings and recommendations.
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Are Telephone Polls Understating Support for Trump?
An experiment comparing responses to 27 questions fielded on both a telephone and a web survey found no significant mode differences in overall opinion about Trump or many of his signature policy positions.
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A basic question when reading a poll: Does it include or exclude nonvoters?
Opinion polls in the U.S. can address the same topic yet reach very different results. There are several reasons this can happen, but we tackle one of the most basic: Did the poll include or exclude the 45% who didn’t vote in November?
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Video: The Research Lifecycle – A Look Inside Pew Research Center
Lee Rainie and Dr. Cary Funk explain the type of research they do with Pew Research Center, as well as how the Center chooses what projects to tackle, in this video from SAGE.
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Video: Why 2016 election polls missed their mark
The results of the 2016 presidential election came as a surprise to nearly everyone who had been following the national and state election polling
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Why 2016 election polls missed their mark
There is a great deal of speculation but no clear answers as to the cause of the disconnect, but there is one point of agreement: Across the board, polls underestimated Trump’s level of support.
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Just how does the general election exit poll work, anyway?
The firm that runs the presidential exit poll expects to interview about 100,000 voters across the country by the time the polls close on election night.
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Oversampling is used to study small groups, not bias poll results
As oversampling and its possible effect on presidential polls are spotlighted ahead of Election Day, learn more about this practice and how pollsters adjust for it.
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Cellphone Activity Flags
As telephone interviewing costs continue to rise and cellphones represent an increasing share of survey samples, survey researchers are exploring approaches to make these designs more cost-effective.
