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Consumer Economic Pulse
Monitoring Uncertainty
How We Poll
Polling companies have changed with mobile
We’ve left phone call polling in the past where it belongs. Through mobile, we reach people where they are and when they want.
Benefits of online polls
Why mobile?
Traditional telephone-based approaches to collecting survey data are problematic. Unprecedented refusal rates, technology barriers, and declining coverage have made telephone surveys obsolete.
Maintaining Agency
Our polls can get personal. We send surveys about health conditions, personal experience with abuse, household possessions, etc. Mobile surveys allow people to control their own narrative on their own terms.
Multimedia Answers
We communicate every day through pictures, audio, and video. Our online polls fit within all the ways we’re already expressing ourselves.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is an online panel?
An online panel is a group of people who have opted in to providing answers to questions.
We recruit online panel participants through targeted banner ad placements and partnerships with non-governmental and charitable organizations to make sure we’re capturing diversity across all sub-segments of the population. Then we maintain panels through advanced sampling techniques and frequent verifications of personal identity, contact information, and demographic characteristics.
Can an online panel represent the entire population?
“Representativeness” means that a small sample is so similar to a larger group that you can trust the results would be similar if the large group was tested.
Our forum contains enough people in each major demographic group to draw randomized samples that represent the population as a whole. Our surveys are based on representative samples from each panel that are randomized and statistically weighted according to the most current demographic and regional voting data available.
How does Angus Reid conduct surveys?
Step 1: We create a balanced sample matrix of the population.
Step 2: We select panelists who receive an email invitation to complete a survey.
Step 3: Respondents receive a small monetary incentive for completing each survey, and they’re occasionally entered into prize draws.
Note that we abide by strict confidentiality and privacy guidelines. The personal information of our community members is never divulged to anyone.
What makes your polls more accurate than other polls I see online?
A common misconception is that online polls are inadequate because anyone can take part and skew the sample.
Angus Reid polls aren’t like the quick polls you might find on Facebook or Twitter. Our polls are always accompanied by a section that describes the methodology in detail: number of interviews, dates, and margin of error. Sometimes we use quick polls to recruit new panel members to the Angus Reid Forum, but their results are never reported to the public.
Does an online panel allow for random selection?
Invitations for particular surveys are sent to a randomly selected portion of the Angus Reid Forum to ensure a representative sample.