Survey & Polling Methodology

Survey research has played a pivotal role in politics for the better part of the last century, with a wide range of campaign and public policy professionals conducting surveys to gain insight into the thoughts, feelings, and opinions of the electorate and citizenry as a whole. Since the early 2000s, the use of survey experiments has become exponentially more prevalent in the political realm as a way to assess attitudes, anticipate reactions, or measure causal relationships. Recent trends point to the growing importance of the internet and social media to conduct surveys and the linkage of survey data with the wealth of publicly available personal information as well as with information on individuals’ social and economic behavior. In this course, students will learn about the strengths and weaknesses of survey research as well as limitations associated with survey design and various analytical techniques, and they will acquire concrete knowledge of practical tools used in campaigns, advocacy, and election forecasting. Students will be introduced to a set of principles for conducting survey research and analyzing survey data that are the basis for standard practice in the field. Students will be familiarized with terminology and concepts associated with survey questionnaire design, sampling, data collection and aggregation, and survey data analysis to gain insights and to test hypotheses about the nature of human and social behavior and interaction. The course will present a framework that will enable students to evaluate the influence of different sources of error on the quality of data.