Methods and Techniques

Public opinion polling involves procedures to draw a representative sample of the population under study. When proper techniques of random sampling are used and the sample is large enough, the results obtained are likely to be very close to the results one would get if the entire population were surveyed.

Ideally, questions should be short, clear, direct, and easily understood. Factors that can affect the respondent's answer include wording or phrasing; the order in which questions are asked; the interviewer's tone; and age, sex, class, or racial differences between the respondent and the interviewer. Once the opinion data have been gathered, the analyst must seek to find meaning in the results, keeping in mind the problems of sampling variability, question-wording biases, and interviewer effects. The results are tabulated and analyzed using various statistical techniques to determine patterns.