Taking the Pulse: Polling Citizen Opinion on Tax and Bond Questions

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• published: 21 May 2016
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Don't hesitate to comment below if you have any questions or additional phrases Taking the Pulse:Polling Citizen Opinionon Tax and Bond Questions Presented to the North Carolina Association of County Commissioners 24 January 2008 By Mark Wm. Hertzog, Ph.D. ,Contents Why Poll? How Polling is Done: Questionnaire Development Sampling and Sampling Error Fielding: Interviewing and Quality Control Post-Fielding: Topline Results, Reporting, and Public Release Two Examples: Durham County 2007 Last Thoughts ,Why Poll? Show your citizens that you care what they think by asking them. Nothing provokes more citizen objections in a referendum campaign than the feeling they are not being consulted. Test-drive potential tax and bond issues. Certain measures may pass easily, while others will encounter strong opposition. Anticipate Citizen Concerns Find out underlying voter concerns and objections, so you can address them, either by adjusting the proposal to meet them, or answering them in your campaign. Track Campaign Progress Periodic tracking studies can show your citizen advocacy group how the campaign is doing, and what effect (if any) news reports, advertising and endorsements for both sides, and other issues are affecting voter attitudes and likelihood to vote. ,Questionnaire Development Basic Construction Done in direct consultation with sponsors. Consists of both “closed-ended” responses (yes/no, ratings on a scale, etc.) and “open-ended” verbatim responses. Includes essential demographic questions, as well as attitudinal and behavioral ones. Final draft is programmed into a computer-assisted telephone interviewing (CATI) system. Research house will manually test the survey program multiple times, to find bugs and get them corrected. Automated testing then is done with computer-generated mock data prior to final approval. IMPORTANT: Assume 5 business days from final approval of the questionnaire to the start of interviewing. ,Questionnaire Development Sponsor Identification Questionnaire either identifies the sponsor (e.g., “the Durham County government”), or is “blinded”—that is, the polling company is identified, but not the sponsor. If the county is sponsoring the poll, identifying the sponsor is more likely to encourage cooperation. If a citizen group is sponsoring the poll, it may be better to “blind” the survey, so as not to prejudice the respondents’ answers. Rules of thumb Need to be brief and to the point to maximize responses. Ideally 10 minutes or less. Response categories should be appropriate to the question asked. Questions must not lead respondents to a “right” answer. ,Sampling and Sampling Error Sampling Best source of sample: voter registration lists. A randomized subset of these are selected to obtain telephone number matches from a commercial vendor. Calls are made from the subset with phone numbers. If voter registration lists aren’t available, use random-digit dialing (RDD) to residential phone numbers, plus screening questions. How Many Interviews? Minimum is 384 to obtain a sampling error of no more than +/- 5% overall. Comparisons between two or more subsets of voters will have higher sampling errors. To reduce sampling error to +/- 4%, need 625 interviews. ,Sampling and Sampling Error Assuring the Sample Looks Like the Electorate Essential criterion: Talk to registered voters who are at least somewhat likely to vote. Use stratified random sampling: that is, set minimum or maximum limits (quotas) of interviews from specific demographic categories, based on previous turnout and current voter registration. State Board of Elections breaks out voters in recent elections by gender, race, age cluster, and precinct. Voter registration lists include additional demographics: age in years, zip code, municipality (if any) ,Fielding Briefing/Training Once the CATI-programmed questionnaire is finalized and the sample is loaded into the system, interviewer training and a client briefing are held. You and the project manager brief the interviewers