Issues of Sampling and Mode for PR Surveys

For representative results, it is more important that sampling be well designed than that there be thousands of responses. Unfortunately, this is a distinction that most reporters ignore and that many researchers, in the interest of minimizing costs, obscure....

Common Sample Sizes for PR Surveys in 2016

The typical survey reported in the 2016 corpus of news releases has 1,000 respondents (median size), with 73% having 500 or more responses, 55% having 1,000 or more responses, and 35% having 2,000 or more responses. The smallest sample size was 98 responses. The more...

Designing PR Surveys

Writing a questionnaire for a newsmaker survey is different than designing a customer satisfaction or general market research survey. Such general surveys are often academic, clinical, even boring: in contrast, with a newsmaker survey you are looking for punch and...

DIY Survey Research

I’m old enough to remember typing pools – though not old enough to remember when the secretaries in them were using typewriters. They were using word processors – not software like Microsoft Word but hardware like the Wang OIS, a dedicated system for timeshared word...

Key Recommendations for Online Sampling

Probability sampling remains the gold standard for producing results that are representative of target populations. So much so that non-probability methods typically try to emulate or mimic probability sampling where possible: Positioning a panel survey as a random...