To better understand the current landscape of commercially available online nonprobability samples, Pew Research Center conducted a study in which an identical questionnaire was administered to nine samples supplied by eight different vendors along with the Center’s probability-based online panel. A benchmarking analysis – in which a subset of each survey’s results was compared to […]
The analysis in this report is based on telephone interviews conducted April 12-19, 2016 among a national sample of 2,008 adults, 18 years of age or older, living in all 50 U.S. states and the District of Columbia (505 respondents were interviewed on a landline telephone, and 1,503 were interviewed on a cell phone, including […]
High-profile polling failures in recent elections have drawn attention to the challenges in using surveys to predict outcomes. Our study examines various methods of determining who is a likely voter.
While the possibility of falsified data is an important consideration in survey research, a new tool to detect it fails to perform as advertised.
Many nonprobability sample vendors have the ability to provide samples of respondents that, by design, are forced to align with characteristics of the U.S. population. Often those characteristics are demographics such as gender and age, though some vendors also use nondemographic variables. When a vendor forces the sample to match the population on a particular […]
Website Analysis Methodology This study examined the campaign websites of presidential candidates Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders through an audit of design features, static content and original news items (news articles, press releases and videos) posted to their websites from May 1 through June 15, 2016. During this period, there were 220 original […]