Public Opinion Polling: A Handbook For Public Interest And Citizen Advocacy Groups

By Celinda Montana Alliance for Progressive Policy and Celinda Lake

In Public Opinion Polling, Celinda C. Lake and Pat Callbeck Harper draw on years of experience and hands-on work in polling and interpreting public opinion polls for political candidates and public interest organizations. This handbook offers field-tested, easy-to-use, and cost-effective instructions for constructing and analyzing polls. Helps the user to: define the poll's objectives understand what a sample is write questionnaires that get the information you want conduct efficient interviews. Companion software provides a complete package for conducting polls and analyzing results.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Island Press
• Release date: Apr 24, 2013
• ISBN: 9781610913041

Book preview

Harper

CHAPTER ONE

Before We Begin . . .

In 1984, polling became a $4-billion-a-year business. Polls help us determine everything, from which dog food people buy to which political candidate they will vote for.

Jimmy Carter probably knew on election eve in 1980 that he would not be reelected because his pollsters had done a good job of predicting.

The editors of Literary Digest magazine in 1936, foretelling their demise because of their prediction on the FDR-Landon race, probably wished they had had such good pollsters working for them — they had predicted that Landon would win with 60% of the vote!

Polls are a tremendously valuable tool in today’s political world. Our goal with this guidebook and associated software package is to make this tool fully accessible to public interest groups. You need to know how to use this important tool. But first, you need to know what’s in this book and how to use it.

THE USES OF THIS BOOK

There are two major uses for this guidebook:

To help you plan and complete a professional poll.

To help you become a wise consumer of polls for your own and your organization’s best interests.

This book presents hands-on information on how to plan, administer, and analyze a poll. And because polls can be used against you, this book also helps you to analyze the sampling, interpretation, and question-wording of polls conducted by other orgnizations.

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FIGURE 1-1 Graphic conventions to help you are used throughout this book.

The text includes examples, checklists, warnings of possible pitfalls, and lists of additional material and human resources to help you in your polling efforts. Samples of most of the materials you will need to produce a poll are also included.

The software package POLLSTART, its manual, and this book give you a complete package for polling that takes you from sampling through analysis. More information on POLLSTART is found in Appendix F. This book also is designed to be used on its own without the software package.

Some polling manuals tell you just enough to conduct your poll but don’t explain the theory or logic behind this tool. This often means that any adjustments you may make can unwittingly endanger the quality of your poll. Other textbooks are too complex, detailed, and lengthy to be used well and easily by public and citizen interest groups. This book strikes a middle ground.

HOW TO USE THIS BOOK

You might ask, Why not just pick a chapter and start polling? Since the results of this important scientific tool could be very important to your work and your organization, we suggest that you read the book through completely. A good understanding of polling and the choices you must make before you begin will reap benefits for you later.

The chapters will walk you through the rationale and the steps in polling. Most chapters end with a checklist of questions that you need to answer before going on to the next stage. Suggestions of community resources for additional help are also noted.

If you are using this book primarily as a consumer of polls, you will want to concentrate on the chapters on sampling, questionnaire construction, and analysis. By using the suggestions and checklists provided in this book, you are certain to become a more skilled user and consumer of polls to your benefit and that of your organization.

CHAPTER TWO

Introduction to Polling

LET’S START AT THE BEGINNING — WHAT IS A POLL?

A poll is a systematic, scientific, and impartial way of collecting information from a subset, or sample, of people that is used to generalize to a greater group, or population, from which the sample was drawn. A poll is not designed to persuade or identify individuals — there are cheaper and more efficient ways of doing that (telephone canvass, for example). Confusing these goals with those of a poll can seriously bias the information you receive. A poll also is not intended to describe any one individual in depth. Again, a case study is a cheaper and more efficient way to do that. A poll is a measurement at one point in time that reveals attitudes, behaviors, beliefs, attributes, and the interrelationship of all of these parameters. These generalizations can then be extended to the larger society.

In a poll, information is obtained in a scientific, controlled way from a selected subset of people.

A properly selected subset enables you to generalize your findings reliably to a greater population (without talking to everyone) after attributing a known margin of error to the sampling. Careful interviewing, questionnaire construction, and analysis also minimize other forms of error that are difficult to measure.

Because a poll is not designed to influence or persuade people, you should never identify your organization or goals in such a way as to influence your respondents’ answers. The interviewing should be kept as neutral as possible.

WHAT ARE THE VALUES OF POLLING?

To give you an idea of how valuable a poll can be to your organization, we have listed some of the kinds of information a poll can help you obtain. Polls can help you determine:

□ What people are thinking — what they see as important problems, what their opinions on policy and issue questions are, what tradeoffs they are willing to make in policy and budgetary decisions, what they think are appropriate arenas for public involvement, and how they want to see resources allocated.

□ What people know — what political figures and groups they are aware of, which issues and arguments about issues are important to them, and what factual information they have.

□ How people perceive issues and political objects — how they evaluate their political figures’ and institutions’ performances, what emotional attachment they have for groups and individuals, for whom they would vote, and what reactions they have to certain slogans or information about political figures and issues.

□ Characteristics of people — what their social and political characteristics are, how interested they are in a topic or event, and where they get their information on different topics.

The most valuable aspect of polling, however, is not just looking at these parameters individually, but rather linking them — seeing who feels what, where they live, how they can be reached, what points are important to them, and what issues are linked for them.

Examining the covariance, or linkage of opinions with other attitudes and social and political characteristics, reveals why certain beliefs are held, as well as what beliefs are held. This information can be used to develop strategies for influencing public opinion, political events, and political figures. You can target groups by issue and demographic characteristics. You can discuss or confront issues with an awareness of how those issues are actually perceived by different groups.

Polls have tremendous internal value for your group in developing strategies and assessing the impact of strategy and events. They also can be used externally. Polls can be released as the basis for news items; they also can be used to obtain money, political support, and media attention by demonstrating the viability of your ideas or candidacy. Polls can be used to influence the behavior of public officials or rally the support of your volunteers. They can be a service you exchange with allied groups or political candidates . . . and much, much more.

There are many situations in which a public interest group might want to conduct a survey using volunteers. For example, you might want to contribute this as an in-kind service to a candidate who supports your issues. You might use a poll to target a bad incumbent, using the results to develop strategies for recruiting a challenger and defeating the incumbent. You might want to bring an issue to people’s attention, but before you do so you may need to measure what people believe and why they hold those