How we measured Americans’ engagement in public life
This piece explains how researchers measured Americans’ engagement in public life using multimode surveys, address-based sampling and cluster analysis.
A behind-the-scenes blog about research methods at Pew Research Center.
For our latest findings, visit pewresearch.org.
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Measuring partisanship in Europe: How online survey questions compare with phone polls
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Reproducibility as part of code quality control
In this post, we discuss reproducibility as a part of Pew Research Center’s code review process.
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Redacting identifying information with computational methods in large text data
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How we adopted Kubernetes for our data science infrastructure
In this post, we delve into Kubernetes – the back-end tool that powers the systems our research team interacts with.
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Improving our website’s accessibility with alt text for charts
Our approach to alt text – and overall website accessibility – has evolved in recent years.
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How adding a ‘Don’t know’ response option can affect cross-national survey results
In our surveys, people are much less likely to skip questions online than when speaking to interviewers in person or on the phone; we explore how offering a “Don’t know” option in online surveys affects results.
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What Twitter users say versus what they do: Comparing survey responses with observed behaviors
We explore the connection between Americans’ survey responses and their digital activity using data from our past Twitter research.
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Assessing the effects of generation using age-period-cohort analysis
In this piece, we demonstrate how to conduct age-period-cohort analysis, a statistical tool, to determine the effects of generation.
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Can machines compete with humans in transcribing audio? A case study using sermons from U.S. religious services
To test whether machine transcription would be practical for studies of sermons in 2019 and 2020, we compared human and machine transcriptions of snippets from a random sample of 200 audio and video sermons.
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Identifying partisan ‘leaners’ in cross-national surveys
In 2022, we experimented with a new question in cross-national surveys to capture the international equivalent of U.S. partisan “leaners.”
