… Don’t you love it when politicians battle over policy by citing polls that purport to show the American public is on their side? … We want to use this exchange over the Keystone XL pipeline as an opportunity to help readers — and politicians tempted to cite them — […] Read more »
Surveying Change
… To track changes over the decades in attitudes and action accurately, not only should the samples drawn in different eras be comparable, the questions asked should be the same – whether they are about church attendance, political participation, racial views, whatever. As the noted sociologist Otis Dudley Duncan reportedly […] Read more »
A public opinion trend that matters: Priorities for gun policy
Last month, the Pew Research Center released a survey showing that a question about gun policy we have been asking since 1993 had passed a key milestone: For the first time in more than two decades, a higher percentage (52%) said it was more important to protect the right of […] Read more »
Pew Research will call more cellphones in 2015
The number of Americans who rely only on a cellphone for their telephone service continues to grow. … To keep pace with this rapid trend, the Pew Research Center will increase the percentage of respondents interviewed on cellphones in its typical national telephone surveys to 65%; 35% of interviews will […] Read more »
There is danger at the margin
Pollsters and pundits spend lots of time studying margins — how far ahead or behind a given candidate is relative to his or her opponent. Focusing on margins is a dangerous game, however, and one of the reasons polls appeared off the mark this past year. Surveys are designed to […] Read more »
How to make surveys in war zones better, and why this is important
Surveys are now a common, though largely unacknowledged, counterinsurgency tool of the contemporary battlefield. … Certain problems associated with administering surveys in war zones are well known and largely unavoidable. Analysts at the RAND Corporation, for instance, have observed that conflict can prevent enumerators from accessing the most dangerous – […] Read more »