Telephone Surveys

The difference in support for the death penalty by survey mode has important consequences for understanding trends on the issue.

Looking at final estimates of the outcome of the 2020 U.S. presidential race, 93% of national polls overstated the Democratic candidate’s support among voters, while nearly as many (88%) did so in 2016.

Given the errors in 2016 and 2020 election polling, how much should we trust polls that attempt to measure opinions on issues?

Since the establishment of the ATP, the Center has gradually migrated away from telephone polling and toward online survey administration, and since early 2019, the Center has conducted most of its U.S. polling on the ATP. This shift has major implications for the way the Center measures trends in American religion – including those from the Center’s flagship Religious Landscape Studies, which were conducted by phone in 2007 and 2014.

Eight-in-ten Americans say they don’t generally answer their cellphone when an unknown number calls, our survey found.

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.

How many U.S. adults use the internet? There are a lot of sources with answers to this question. Yet these different sources can be tricky to reconcile.

Response rates to telephone public opinion polls conducted by Pew Research Center have resumed their decline, to 7% in 2017 and 6% in 2018.

What does the migration to online polling mean for the country's trove of public opinion data gathered over the past four decades?

Pew Research Center conducts surveys over the phone and, increasingly, online. But these two formats don’t always produce identical results.