About how much does a professional opinion survey cost (for a pop. of 4,000)?

[js_africanus]

There is a divisive issue in the township where I work. There is talk of doing a survey to determine the public opinion on it. A survey on a somewhat related topic was done in the past; however, it was an in-house operation and I question the ability of those who did it and the validity of their results.

Question: Anybody know about how much it would cost to have a non-partisan polling firm or market research firm to do it? Obviously there'll be lots of variables, but can you get within an order of magnitude, maybe? A few thousand dollars? A few tens of thousands? Over a hundred thousand dollars?

Curiously yours,

js_I want to give you a good polling_africanus.

[Jonathan Chance]

I use a firm in Colorado Springs for such things. If done by phone it's generally about 3-5 dollars per completed call.

[kunilou]

Call your state university. A lot of them have researchers who do polling either as part of their own research or as a semi-public entity within the university. The price will be a little (but not a lot) less than a private firm, and you'll be able to deflect charges that it's a "partisan" pollster.

The big problem I've seen with pollsters is not their ability to do the poll, but to write the questions. It's very difficult to construct a thorough survey that can't be accused of leading the respondent to a desired answer. The best solution is to have someone (smart) from each side vette the questions before the first call is ever made.

[madmonk28]

Also, be vigilant in keeping the survey short. Once you start planning a survey, everyone wants to add questions and the thing gets out of hand.

[Smeghead]

I used to work for a nationally respected telephone surveying company. Cost depended on the size of the project and some other variables, but as a rough ballpark estimate, we charged about one dollar per question per respondant for a close-ended (multiple choice) question, and about five dollars per question per respondant for an open-ended question that required our interviewers to record the person's response verbatim.