Public Opinion Polling Basics
By the end of our free, five-lesson course, you will know why we have polls, what the different kinds of polls are, how polling works and what you should look for in a poll.
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Methodological Research
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Behind Trump’s 2024 Victory, a More Racially and Ethnically Diverse Voter Coalition
Pew Research Center’s in-depth study of its survey respondents who voted in the 2024 election examines turnout, voting patterns and demographics.
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Q&A: Why and how we compared the public’s views of artificial intelligence with those of AI experts
In this Q&A, we speak with Brian Kennedy, a senior researcher at the Center, on why and how we conducted the survey of AI experts.
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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.
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How Pew Research Center Uses Its National Public Opinion Reference Survey (NPORS)
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.
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Quiz: Test your polling knowledge
Test your knowledge of public opinion polling by taking our 10-question quiz.
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How do people in the U.S. take Pew Research Center surveys, anyway?
Here, we address some of the most common questions we receive about the nuts and bolts of taking a U.S.-focused Pew Research Center poll.
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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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Online opt-in polls can produce misleading results, especially for young people and Hispanic adults
We examine how an opt-in poll may have unintentionally misled the public about the sensitive issue of Holocaust denial among young Americans.
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Who Are You? The Art and Science of Measuring Identity
As a shop that studies human behavior through surveys and other social scientific techniques, we have a good line of sight into the contradictory nature of human preferences. Here’s a look at how we categorize our survey participants in ways that enhance our understanding of how people think and behave.
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Q&A: How we used large language models to identify guests on popular podcasts
We asked researchers how they used the newest generation of large language models to analyze roughly 24,000 podcast episodes.
Signature Reports
A Field Guide to Polling: Election 2020 Edition
While survey research in the United States is a year-round undertaking, the public’s focus on polling is never more intense than during the run-up to a presidential election.
Comparing Two Types of Online Survey Samples
Pew Research Center conducted a study to compare the accuracy of six online surveys of U.S. adults – three from probability-based panels and three from opt-in sources. On average, the absolute error on opt-in samples was about twice that of probability-based panels.
Q&A: What is the American Trends Panel, and how has it changed?
Members of the American Trends Panel can now take our surveys online or over the phone with an interviewer.
How Public Polling Has Changed in the 21st Century
A new study found that 61% of national pollsters used different methods in 2022 than in 2016. And last year, 17% of pollsters used multiple methods to sample or interview people – up from 2% in 2016.
