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.
Survey Methods
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.
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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Response rates in telephone surveys have resumed their decline
Response rates to telephone public opinion polls conducted by Pew Research Center have resumed their decline, to 7% in 2017 and 6% in 2018.
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What our transition to online polling means for decades of phone survey trends
What does the migration to online polling mean for the country’s trove of public opinion data gathered over the past four decades?
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Methods 101: Mode effects
How does the way a poll is conducted influence the answers people give?
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Phone vs. online surveys: Why do respondents’ answers sometimes differ by mode?
Pew Research Center conducts surveys over the phone and, increasingly, online. But these two formats don’t always produce identical results.
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How highly religious Americans view evolution depends on how they’re asked about it
Evolution remains a contentious issue. When asked about it, highly religious Americans’ responses can vary depending on how the question is asked.
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The Evolution of Pew Research Center’s Survey Questions About the Origins and Development of Life on Earth
Measuring public opinion on evolution has never been an easy task for survey researchers.
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‘Good jobs’ vs. ‘jobs’: Survey experiments can measure the effects of question wording – and more
The way polling questions are asked can influence people’s answers. Survey experiments are one way to measure the degree to which different questions elicit different answers.
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Country-Specific Methodology
Detailed information on Pew Research Center international survey meethodology, such as mode of interview, sampling design, margin of error, and design effect, for each country we survey, organized by survey, country and year.
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How asking about your sleep, smoking or yoga habits can help pollsters verify their findings
Pew Research Center uses benchmarking questions to ensure our surveys are accurate. Learn why and how we use these questions.
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Exit polls, election surveys and more: A guide for the 2018 midterms
On election night 2018, besides the exit polls there will be an additional source of data on who voted and why, developed by The Associated Press, Fox News and NORC at the University of Chicago and based on a very different methodology. That means that depending on where you go for election news, you may get a somewhat different portrait of this year’s electorate.
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