Numbers, Facts and Trends Shaping Your World
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How precise are polls…really? Courtney Kennedy let’s us in on a little secret: even the best pollsters need some wiggle room when sharing results. This “wiggle room” (also known as the margin of error) is the range within the true answer likely falls.
Explore trends in partisan identification among U.S. adults using data from Pew Research Center’s National Public Opinion Reference Survey (NPORS).
NPORS is an annual survey of U.S. adults conducted by the Pew Research Center used to to produce benchmark estimates for several topics.
Anyone can ask a survey question online – but does that make it a good poll? They might call themselves a pollster, but their methods aren’t exactly best practice — and the internet is flooded with these low-quality polls. Here are a few simple things you can look for to tell whether a poll is legit or sketchy.
Courtney Kennedy, vice president of methods and innovation, answers some common questions about the current polling landscape in the U.S.
We often hear a candidate is leading, trailing, or the race is tied. This is based on “horse race” polling, which estimates how much support candidates have, based on how people answer surveys leading up to an election. But accurately measuring the horse race is wicked hard for a few reasons.
Ever wonder how we collect our data? Today, most polls are conducted online. But, most pollsters reject the idea that “one size fits all” when it comes to polling, so we still use phone calls or mail to reach people.
We’re in an era where the people most likely to respond to a poll are also the most likely to vote Democratic for president. Pew Research Center’s head methodologist Courtney Kennedy explains how pollsters are tackling this challenge to make samples as representative as possible.
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.
This piece explains why, when and how we are weighting our surveys on Americans’ past vote.
