Electronic Resources for Research Methods

Quantitative research methods

Public Opinion Polling

Polling organizations

This list is not comprehensive: an attempt has been made to select organizations that make results or methods available.



• Ipsos Reid Corporation., Vancouver, BC, Canada. 
• Environics Research Group  Toronto: ONT. Canada.

  Site includes a couple of on-line surveys that are interesting examples of the genre.



• The Gallup Organization.  Princeton, NJ: USA.

  Probably the best known polling organization in the world. The outline results of many polls are available at the site.

  
  
• Maritz Inc., Fenton, MI. USA. 

  "Maritz Research is one of the world's leading marketing research firms. We help many of today's largest and most successful companies achieve financial gains by discovering, understanding, and closing gaps between their brand promise and their customers' experiences. We employ sector-specific research solutions to examine three critical integrated dynamics that are essential to a brand's success: customer choice, customer experience, and customer loyalty. " It makes publicly available the Maritz Poll - a consumer, telephone survey on various issues.



• MORI: Market & Opinion Research International. London, UK.

  Maintains a polls archive.



• NOP Research Group.  London, UK.

  "NOP Research Group is part of NOP World, one of the world’s largest market research and business information companies, offering both custom and syndicated research, as well as research-based consulting, and analytic CRM services around the world. " Brief press releases on various surveys availabe at the site.



• The Pew Research Center.  Washington, DC: USA.

  "The Center is an independent opinion research group that studies attitudes toward the press, politics and public policy issues. We are best known for regular national surveys that measure public attentiveness to major news stories, and for our polling that charts trends in values and fundamental political and social attitudes. Formerly, the Times Mirror Center for the People & the Press (1990-1995), we are now sponsored by The Pew Charitable Trusts.
  The Center's purpose is to serve as a forum for ideas on the media and public policy through public opinion research. In this role it serves as an important information resource for political leaders, journalists, scholars, and public interest organizations. All of our current survey results are made available free of charge.
  The research program includes five principal areas of investigation:
  

  • The People & The Press - explores public attitudes about the credibility, social value and salience of the news media.
  • The People, The Press & Politics - features a typology which divides the American electorate into distinct voting groups and identifies the basic values and attitudes that animate political behavior.
  • The News Interest Index - measures on a regular basis how closely the public follows the major news stories and links this to views about politics and policy issues.
  • America's Place in the World - a series of in-depth surveys and analyses of the public and opinion leaders on international policy in the post-Cold War era.
  • Media Use - major surveys that measure the public's use of, and attitudes toward, the Internet and traditional news outlets."

  
  
• Roper ASW  

  Large market research group - part of the NOP Group of companies.

Other resources

• Flemming, Gregory & Parker, Kimberly (1997)   Race and reluctant respondents: rossible consequences of non-response for pre-election surveys.  Washington, D: The Pew Research Center.

  "Pre-election polling is tricky work. A number of unknown factors can stand in the way of accurate predictions -- problems with identifying registered and likely voters, uncertainties about voter turnout, and last-minute shifts in candidate preference. But estimating voter preferences in biracial elections has been especially difficult. Pre-election surveys, even those taken just days before voters go to the polls, often substantially underestimate support for white candidates in races where the other candidate is African-American. "   [A Report for Presentation at the 1997 Meeting of the American Association for Public Opinion Research]

  
  
• Hoek, Janet & Gendall, Philip (1998)  Factors affecting political poll accuracy: an analysis of undecided respondents. Marketing Bulletin, 8.

  "Recently, pollsters have experienced discrepancies between their poll predictions and subsequent election outcomes. One possible explanation of these divergencies is the growing proportion of undecided respondents in poll samples. This paper discusses three methods of reducing the proportion of undecided respondents: the use of contextual questions; a secret ballot device; and the use of a relative, rather than absolute, behavioural question. It concludes that, although it is possible to completely eliminate this group from poll samples, reductions in the proportion of undecided respondents are not necessarily matched by an increase in the accuracy of the poll estimates. Indeed, this study found that the sub-sample with the highest proportion of undecided respondents also produced the most accurate estimates. The paper concludes that direct intention questions, together with reduced contextual questions, and allocation of undecided respondents in proportion to party support levels, seem likely to produce the most accurate poll estimates."

  
  
• Moore, David  (1997)  Polls  [Real Audio lecture by David Moore of the Gallup Organization]  

  You will need to scroll down this page to the specific lecture, which also features on-screen slides. Authoritative and entertaining.

  
  
• Prairie Research Associates Inc. (1996)  A Primer on polls.   Winnipeg, MB: Prairie Research Associates Inc.

  "Public opinion polls are pervasive. For the most part, published reports by the pollsters fail to provide sufficient information to allow expert appraisal of the overall validity of the results. Some polls do report overall sample size, and a theoretical measure of accuracy, but the crucial aspects of the poll are usually obscure.
  This note outlines the information needed to appraise a public opinion poll or survey research."

  
  
• Roper Center for Public Opinion Research  

  "Founded in 1947, the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research is the leading educational facility in the field of public opinion. The Center exists to promote the intelligent, responsible and imaginative use of public opinion in addressing the problems faced by Americans and citizens of other nations. In an increasingly complex and interdependent global environment, the Roper Center hopes to foster increased international understanding and to promote cross-national research. Through the maintenance of the world's largest archive of survey data, and through its programs of publication, presentation and advanced research, the Roper Center strives to improve the practice of survey research and the use of survey data in the United States and abroad."

  
  
• Social and Community Planning Research and University of Southampton Centre for Applied Social Surveys  Question bank.

  "The Question Bank contains full questionnaires texts and layouts. It reproduces instruments used to conduct important, large-scale, quantitative social surveys in the United Kingdom. The site is the most accessible source of questionnaires in the UK and contains material that exists elsewhere only in paper form which may be hard to find. It also contains methodological commentary and other technical material relating to survey questions and survey measurement.
  The Question Bank contains a large number of questions used in major quantitative social surveys in the United Kingdom, surveys that influence social policy decisions.
  The questions are all reproduced in their full original form, including any predetermined response categories, interviewer instructions, etc. Questions are shown in the original context of the questionnaire of which they formed part. The context of other questions in which a particular question occurs is often very important to understanding how it worked as a form of communication with respondents and as a means to construct a particular measure or variable for use in survey analysis. Examples of more than 30 major surveys are now available."



• University of North Carolina. Howard W. Odum Institute for Research in Social Science (n.d.) Public opinion poll question database.  

  "...allows any researcher to search for specific poll questions among the more than 230,000 questions in the Institute's archive by key words, date, study number, study title, or state. The system displays the full question text, study information, and frequency distributions, so it is useful both to users interested in looking up previous question wordings to develop questions for their own studies, and to users interested in frequencies or in locating particular variables for statistical analysis."

  
  

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