Telephone Surveys

What does the migration to online polling mean for the country's trove of public opinion data gathered over the past four decades?

Pew Research Center conducts surveys over the phone and, increasingly, online. But these two formats don’t always produce identical results.

A new telephone survey experiment finds that an opinion poll drawn from a commercial voter file produces results similar to those from a sample based on random-digit dialing.

Question 1: Measuring religious identity How does Pew Research Center measure the religious identity of survey respondents and the religious composition of the U.S.? Answer: Generally, we rely on respondents’ self-identification.  A key question we ask in many surveys is: “What is your present religion, if any? Are you Protestant, Roman Catholic, Mormon, Orthodox such […]

The U.S. has more foreign students enrolled in its colleges and universities than any other country in the world. Explore data about foreign students in the U.S. higher education system.

Establishing the interviewer’s perceived race or ethnicity is essential to understanding how it might affect the respondent’s answers to survey questions.

People polled by telephone are slightly less likely than those interviewed online to say their personal finances are in “poor shape."

A new analysis sheds light on concerns raised among pollsters that the medium by which a survey question is asked – its mode – can affect responses.

The first video in Pew Research Center’s Methods 101 series helps explain random sampling – a concept that lies at the heart of all probability-based survey research – and why it’s important.